CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY | Carestream Healthcare

Simplifying Global Purchasing, E-invoicing and Inbound Logistics

Company Profile

Carestream Healthcare Medical Imaging

Descartes Solutions

The pace of change in today’s worldwide healthcare environment

Descartes B2B™ EZE Collaboration

is rapid, and the mandate to provide better outcomes for

people has never been greater. For global medical imaging and healthcare IT solutions, Carestream Health is a company providing medical and information technology solutions using Descartes B2B EZE Collaboration to simplify its complex purchase-to-pay and inbound logistics processes and to fully automate e-invoicing compliance. This is helping the company deliver a flexible, global collaboration solution to reduce operating costs and lead times while increasing inbound visibility and receiving efficiency. They also provide product, technical and service support, including remote equipment and software management services. In addition, they own over 600 patents in digital imaging, healthcare IT, film and imaging chemistry.

Quick Overview

Challenge Modernize Manual Purchasing and Meet E-invoicing Mandates

Solution Implement Collaboration Tools and Enable Compliance

Results

• Reduced Costs
• Accelerated Receiving Process
• Improved Supply Chain Visibility
• Automated E-invoicing & Compliance

Challenge: Modernize Manual Purchasing and Meet E-invoicing Mandates

Managing the purchasing lifecycle can be challenging, especially for a company with offices in 170 countries, 1,500+ vendors around the world and a diverse customer base ranging from small medical clinics to large networks and even entire countries. With Carestream’s manual practices for purchase order (PO) creation to acknowledgment, changes, receipt, invoicing and payment, the labor involved and the potential for errors was substantial. To further exacerbate matters, there was no standard approach to the purchasing discipline across locations and no enterprise-wide visibility into purchasing activities and workflows. Additionally, Carestream wanted to reduce the risk of non-compliance with global e-invoicing mandates by fully automating the invoicing process while adhering to applicable privacy legislation.

Solution: Implement Collaboration Tools and Enable Compliance

Carestream deployed the cloud-based Descartes B2B Collaboration solution to automate order management throughout the buying process with suppliers of all sizes, and at every level of technical sophistication. The Descartes solution centralizes supply chain data and directly populates Carestream’s SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for POs, acknowledgments, advance shipment notifications (ASN) and invoices.

The Descartes solution provides cost validation against POs to ensure accuracy and reduce errors, eliminating Carestream’s previous challenges with matching POs and invoices. With dramatically fewer blocked invoices, Carestream has recovered ~20,000 hours of productive time annually.

The solution also allowed the company to create a common labeling system for suppliers. The ability for vendors to produce labels for inbound shipments from a central platform accelerates the receiving process. Carestream now enters goods receipts automatically by reading barcodes that include a lot number, which is important for raw material buyers. Vendors can also generate labels for shipments that combine POs. Additionally, for blanket POs, Descartes B2B Collaboration helps Carestream replenish product when it is required. With the ability to rapidly call off stock, the company minimized excess inventory and reduced the amount of administration required to process multiple POs.

To date, Carestream has connected almost 1,500 vendors worldwide to the solution using either web-based connectivity or EDI. With enhanced supply chain collaboration, visibility and process automation, Carestream has removed lower value tasks from its supplier and customer interactions in favor of much more rapid, cost-effective and error-free transaction management. The solution also allows Carestream to customize business rules. For example, goods can be received before an invoice is presented, allowing the fulfillment of customer orders instead of waiting on an administrative process.

Results:

Reduced Costs

The Descartes solution also provided Carestream with a platform to meet compliance obligations in the European Union by transmitting electronic invoices to suppliers. Since replacing manual, paper-based invoicing practices, e-invoicing has spurred many additional benefits for the company, such as driving significant cost-savings, accelerating the order to cash cycle, improving the analysis of buying practices, increasing the efficiency and accuracy of AP processing and enhancing visibility from the minute an e-invoice is generated until payment is received.

Accelerated Receiving Process

By providing vendors with the ability to generate a common barcode label on all inbound shipments, the Descartes solution has helped Carestream to create a faster and more accurate receipt process.