Transition to the cloud
Recognizing how a cloud-based environment would elevate its operational and financial performance, while providing the scalability, flexibility and advanced insights to enhance customer experience, A.M.G. Medical migrated to the SaaS version of Tecsys’ Elite™ ecosystem.
Janick and Jonathan explained why they chose to move to the cloud with Tecsys, and the significant benefits this advancement offers the company, its business partners and customers.
“Today, everything is in the cloud. I can’t imagine a company that has an on-prem application in an area of their operations that requires security. With all the privacy laws and regulations, you have no choice but to be secure.”
A.M.G. Medical
Higher reliability
“The reliability of Tecsys’ cloud applications was a key element in our decision. Taking a real-world example, we had a power outage a few months ago and lost access to our servers — but we still had access to Tecsys. That’s huge,” said Janick.
Enhanced security
“Another selling point of the transition to the cloud was security. Tecsys adheres to industry-leading SaaS security protocols and controls that can help prevent fraud,” continued Janick.
“Today, everything is in the cloud. I can’t imagine a company that has an on-prem application in an area of their operations that requires security. With all the privacy laws and regulations, you have no choice but to be secure.”
Ease of upgrades
The transition from on-prem to SaaS also allows A.M.G. Medical to access upgrades Tecsys makes to its warehouse and supply chain management solutions as they are released, versus having to wait for their IT staff to make manual updates to onsite servers.
“That is one of the key benefits we have derived from our cloud transition. With the on-prem version, there were ‘must have’ capabilities where we had to make modifications to get them. Now, they are an integrated part of the Distribution ERP and WMS software. As Tecsys advances its solutions, we advance our operations alongside them," added Jonathan.
Financial benefits
The cost of going to the cloud is on par with buying hardware. Why would a company stay on-prem for the same cost as using SaaS, especially given the cloud approach offers more security, better reliability and ease of upgrades? For us, the decision was easy to make,” said Janick.
“There are cost savings as well with cloud solutions, both in hardware and IT resources. We don’t have to upgrade servers every few years because we’ve run out of space. And we don’t need IT staff spending hours maintaining equipment and manually performing updates,” added Jonathan.
Agility
A.M.G. Medical has gone live with the multi-channel Shopify platform, which it has integrated with its Elite™ environment.
“We are excited to leverage these capabilities in our relationships with customers. It will help drive our evolution from B2B to B2C," explained Janick.
Data-driven insights
Janick and Jonathan agree that data and analytics are critical to the success of their business. Tecsys’ Elite™ solutions, with their seamless integration, data sharing and advanced analytics tools, offers the team the insights they need for strategic decision-making.
Leveraging the data from Tecsys’ Elite™ solutions and the KPI Digital datamart implementation has both improved A.M.G. Medical’s logistical performance and provided intelligence to customers and partners to advance their operations.
“As we’ve advanced in our digital transformation journey, we’ve significantly expanded the range of data feeding into the Elite™ system. Beyond the core data in Elite™, KPI Digital has integrated additional sources — including customer data, sales data, purchased third-party data and financial data. With Tecsys serving as our single source of truth, KPI Digital ensures we can consolidate and drill down into the data we need to generate accurate, actionable insights,” said Jonathan.
More accurate and complete orders fulfilled faster
According to Janick, demand forecasting, backed by data in Elite™ and enabled through Tecsys’ integrated analytics tools, has been a key element for accurate and efficient order fulfillment. She stated:
“Understanding demand, we can better manage customer needs for JIT orders and deliveries. We can correlate when they need products, in what quantities, delivered to what places with our suppliers to hit fill rate and on-time delivery targets without overstocking.”
A.M.G. Medical’s metrics prove this analytics-driven approach is working:
of orders are shipped within 48 hours of receiving the order
of orders are shipped within 24 hours of receiving the order
reduction in inventory
reduction in rebate validation workload
Jonathan explained how the company measures fill rate based on the complete order (all items filled), and not just by line. To date, they have achieved an 87% complete order fill rate and are on track to reach their goal of 90%.
“We're meeting our customers’ requirements, but always aiming to be better,” he said. “I recently presented to our board of directors the progress we have made from just post-pandemic to today. It's all about servicing the customer better and faster.”
Based on the successful use of Elite™ data and analytics to date, the A.M.G. Medical team has built AI models that it is training with data from the solutions and other sources.
“The most successful AI models to date have been around demand,” added Janick. “We're still in the early days of AI but I believe there is great potential there for other applications.”
Delivering added value to customers
With their focus on exceptional customer service and experience, the A.M.G. Medical team uses insights from Elite™ to inform customer and suppliers of issues and opportunities of which they might not be aware.
For example, reporting from the Tecsys platform revealed that a customer was no longer ordering a product they had regularly ordered in the past. When a member of the A.M.G. Medical team alerted the customer to the possible discrepancy, they found the order stoppage was unintentional.
“We noticed the unusual ordering pattern and were able to tell the customer they had an issue with their system. While they still needed this product, a glitch prevented them from getting it. This type of insight shows how data is really everything today,” Janick recalled.
In another case, a supplier informed the A.M.G. Medical team of a promotion they were running on a product, but reporting showed orders had not increased for that item.
“We can see in the system that promoted product isn’t moving but others are being ordered,” said Jonathan. “By alerting the supplier to the potential issue, they can look at their systems to determine if there is something that needs to be fixed on their end. Maybe they need to change a setting in a field with the click a button.”
According to Jonathan, larger customers and suppliers that are managing countless orders and products most heavily rely on A.M.G. Medical for intelligence because they don’t have the time to proactively identify issues to troubleshoot.
