Canon Improves Package Delivery System for Children's Hospital and Improves Operational Efficiency
Canon Solves Hospital's Delivery System Challenges
As one of the nation’s leading children’s hospitals, our client provides care to critically ill and injured children. However, the hospital’s existing mail, shipping, and receiving system experienced inefficiencies. When mail and packages arrived at the hospital’s receiving dock, an unreliable, paper-based system was used to track them. As a result, mail and deliveries—including medical supplies and equipment—got lost or misdelivered between the dock and critical-care areas of the hospital.
Surgeries occasionally needed to be rescheduled because equipment hadn’t arrived on time, creating a risk for patients and their families. “This was a situation where shipping and receiving issues went beyond just streamlining operational efficiency, as important as that goal is,” stated a hospital executive. “Fixing our process was vital to providing the finest medical care. So we decided to act, and to act fast in bringing onboard the right services provider. That provider was Canon Business Process Services.”
Why did the hospital choose us?
- We were highly experienced in mail, shipping, and receiving, and had implemented many systems to accurately track inbound, outbound, and interoffice mail.
- We were experts in managing print and copy operations.
- We began our partnership with the hospital aiming to improve its processes’ efficiency, costs, and accuracy. That was over a decade ago, and we haven’t stopped helping the hospital improve since.
Our Solution
To start, we helped mail, shipping, and receiving integrate a new tracking system. The old paper-based system got a technological upgrade; now, deliveries are scanned with Personal Digital Assistant's with embedded tracking software and electronic-signature capabilities to capture every step of deliveries.
Next, we created a system to deliver packages according to priority levels. For instance, refrigerated medicine—a high-priority item—is delivered before office supplies and equipment. Similarly, we reworked how mail is sorted and delivered so it arrives at the hospital’s 400 destination points faster and more accurately.
Canon Makes An Impact
Pleased with our impact on these and other processes, the hospital renewed its partnership with us. Over the past several years, the hospital has tapped our expertise for a broad range of projects:
- The hospital had a legacy copier fleet that a previous vendor had mismanaged. We replaced the copiers with a new fleet of networked multifunction devices (MFDs) that feature print, copy, fax, and scan capabilities—saving the hospital the cost of maintaining multiple devices devoted to a single function
- An in-house Canon team manages the print center. In addition to printing invoices, training manuals, and nightly reports critical to patient care, we provide design services and wide-format printing—enabling the hospital to reduce costs associated with sending work to design and print shops
- We implemented a full managed print services (MPS) program to provide maintenance, support, monitoring, and more for over 1,500 devices—cutting costs, streamlining document processes, and reducing stress for the IT department
The hospital took on a big challenge of its own by moving to a new location. Canon is adept at handling such big transitions, and we maintained normalcy for the hospital’s daily functions by managing print, mail, and other services at both the new and old facilities until the relocation was complete.
We have maintained a strong partnership with the hospital from Day One. Over the course of a decade we’ve helped the hospital align its core values to processes that have only grown more efficient and impactful—benefitting the hospital and, more importantly, the young patients under its care.