McKesson Automation Sees 50 Percent Reduction in Supply Chain Costs

Cupertino, CA -- (SBWire) -- 09/04/2013 --Ultriva scheduled an onsite diagnostic visit to McKesson Automation, the largest pharmaceutical distributor in North America and the leading healthcare IT company. Ultriva developed a plan for an initial six-week pilot with four focus areas to include eliminating the use of spreadsheets for exchanging information with suppliers, in favor of an electronic closed-loop system and fixing errors and scalability limitations associated with the manual system. Additionally, the company recommended addressing disconnects in the information flow between order entry, manufacturing shop floor and accounts payable.

Based in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania, McKesson Automation, Inc. began as Automated Healthcare, a company founded in 1987 by Sean McDonald, one of healthcare’s leading technology innovators. Charles Stack, materials manager at McKesson Automation commented, “Initially, we had a manual kanban pull system used to trigger the raw material replenishment process. Because of the growth and complexity of our product lines, we teamed up with Ultriva to move to the electronic kanban system. Our suppliers are now linked via a web portal to our manufacturing floor. Once the inventory is used, a signal is sent to the supplier to initiate the replenishment process. By providing realtime, in-transit inventory status for McKesson Automation and our suppliers, we have realized a 10 percent improvement on inventory turns and a 50 percent reduction in supply chain administrative costs. In addition, entering into long-term strategic alliances with suppliers has further allowed the company to combat inflation and rising costs over the past twelve months.”

McKesson Automation is on target to manage 90 percent of its materials spend on the Ultriva system by encouraging all its raw materials suppliers to tap into the portal, by the year end. The results are impressive. McKesson noted a ten percent improvement on inventory turns, 50 percent reduction in supply chain administrative costs, improved communication between the shop floor and suppliers, and sharpened competitive edge through faster delivery of custom products.

About Ultriva
Ultriva (http://www.ultriva.com) empowers leading industrial, automotive, healthcare, aerospace, and defense businesses to operate more effectively and collaboratively by providing real time visibility and targeted actionable intelligence into inventory and material flows. Ultriva’s cloud-based platform leverages and seamlessly integrates with leading ERP and MRP systems, to deliver an end to end pull based replenishment model for a wide variety of industry sectors and enterprises such as ATK, CareFusion, Emerson, Ingersoll Rand, McKesson, Magellan, Regal Beloit, Thermo Fisher and more. Few Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software solutions meet the requirements of Oracle users who turn to Ultriva’s Supply Chain Cloud solution, an Oracle Validated Integration solution. Ultriva is a privately held, growing software company based in Cupertino, California. Follow Ultriva on Twitter at @Ultriva.

Ultriva, Inc.
http://www.ultriva.com
Cynthia Leonard
Marketing Executive
cynthial@ultriva.com
408.961.2495