Founded in 1979, Southeastern Emergency Equipment (SEE) is the number one source for the tools, training and ongoing support that gives first responders the power to save lives.
In the beginning, SEE’s primary customers consisted of rescue squads and ambulance services in the southeastern United States. Today, SEE has evolved into an international distributor whose employees share a passion for supporting the emergency medical services (EMS) community to the best of their ability.
“We’ve consistently maintained a focus on serving the unique needs of the EMS industry,” said Nikki Mullen, SEE’s vice president. “We sell a full line of pre-hospital equipment and supplies including everything from basic EMS supplies such as band-aids, splints and stretchers to critical care equipment, trailers, WMD/MCI products, pharmaceuticals and emergency vehicles.”
SEE’s customer care team focuses on premium service before and after the sale. Most SEE sales representatives have EMS or fire backgrounds and live close to the customers they serve in dozens of U.S. states where they provide a direct source for expert product demonstrations, training and just plain good advice. A knowledgeable team of customer service representatives (CSRs) located in the main office in Youngsville, NC are dedicated to serving specific groups of customers, building long-term relationships while capably assisting with orders and other requests for service as needed.
SEE setup a training division in 2009 to help paramedics and other health care professionals maintain their certifications. “We have the capacity to teach up to 80 students classroom-style at our training center in Youngsville,” said Nikki. “We can also send instructors onsite at the customer’s request. There are only a few companies in the U.S. who have the credentials to offer these courses, so we are very proud of what we are able to do.”
SEE is led by Carla Baker who began her career in sales and was later promoted to national sales manager before becoming SEE's president in Aug 2003. A Nationally Registered Paramedic, Carla has hands on experience with the SEE product line and instills pride of purpose in the company's mission.
Exceeding customer expectations for over 30 years with quality products, training, support and leadership, SEE is the source for the tools and the knowledge that EMS professionals need to give every patient the critical care they deserve.
SEE Partners with Earnest & Associates
In 2000, SEE realized that its legacy SBT software was insufficient to the task of effectively managing a growing, distribution-centric enterprise. Nikki was tasked with leading the search for a new system that would support SEE’s long-term objectives as a company. Her search led to Earnest & Associate’s (E&A) office in nearby Greensboro, NC and Infor10 Distribution Express (FACTS), a highly configurable solution designed specifically for distributors with industry-specific buying, stocking, selling and servicing capabilities.
“When we were making a decision on what software to go with, it was evident that Infor10 Distribution Express offered us the most options,” recalled Nikki. “However, service was very important to us. The key factor in selecting E&A’s solution was the level of customer service E&A provided to its customers, which we felt was in line with the kind of service we strive to offer to our own customers, too.” Satisfied that E&A had the right software and the expertise to ensure both a successful implementation and the professional aftermarket support services it wanted, SEE awarded the project to E&A.
Nikki gave the E&A team high marks as SEE personnel were prepped to use the new system. “Sometimes change is difficult for people but we made the transition to Infor10 Distribution Express very smoothly,” commented Nikki. “We went to E&A’s office in Greensboro for classroom training and it went exceptionally well. We learned how to use Infor10 Distribution Express to get far more useful information to effectively manage our business than we had ever been able to get from SBT.”
The transition to an integrated system proved beneficial. Nikki compared and contrasted how Infor10 Distribution Express improved SEE’s business processes by providing enterprise-wide access to information. “We were excited because there were things we could begin to do using the software instead of paper,” said Nikki. “For example, accounts payable became easier with Infor10 Distribution Express because we didn’t have to hand-write checks anymore. Similarly, to run a P/L statement using SBT on the amount of business we were doing at that time was a huge undertaking; a typical month end closeout might take us from five to seven days to complete. After implementing Infor10 Distribution Express, our closings are now completed in a matter of hours,” she explained.
As SEE has advanced in its use of technology, E&A’s value-added services have proven useful. For example, E&A University has provided a platform to help SEE train new employees and to get existing employees up-to-speed on the latest software release. “E&A University has been a great tool and will definitely be something we continue to use,” said Nikki. “Infor10 Distribution Express does so many things, there’s no way for one person to retain all that knowledge. When we have brought new people on, we have sent them through the classes so they can gain in-depth experience with the system. We have attended the replenishment classes live and viewed the recorded sessions two or three times in order to thoroughly absorb the lessons.”
Nikki has used content from E&A University as a springboard to develop personalized training programs for SEE employees. “We have blended some of the E&A University content with our own notes to develop a series of internal training sessions for our staff that we like to call ‘Infor10 Distribution Express Friday’s’,” she said. “The classes feature our data along with processes and procedures that are unique to our company.” Nikki believes a logical next step might be to store the Infor10 Distribution Express Friday sessions in a custom library at E&A University where they would be accessible to SEE employees on-demand, whenever they might be needed.
With one-to-one guidance from E&A’s local implementation consultant Wendy Oakes and the benefit of a superbly trained staff, SEE has successfully migrated its Infor10 Distribution Express system forward with minimal disruption to its daily business processes. “All of our upgrades went very smoothly,” said Nikki. “We had quite a few modifications over the years -- some with sales orders, pick tickets, booking commissions reports, and so on -- but I don’t ever remember a time when we upgraded and had a problem with our modifications or any other significant issue.”
SEE's Laser-Sharp Focus on Warehouse Management
In 2008, SEE had all the pieces in place to retool its warehouse operations, including a well-trained staff, access to advanced technologies and a business partner in E&A who recognized an opportunity for SEE to capitalize on its investments.
Witnessing SEE’s challenge of processing an ever-increasing volume of orders and accompanying materials throughput, E&A’s Bill Briggs suggested that SEE take a close look at Pro Warehouse, a solution designed by E&A software engineers to improve warehouse processes pertaining to shipping, receiving, warehouse transfers and physical inventories. SEE recognized the opportunity to interface bar code equipment with Infor10 Distribution Express to help its warehouse staff work more efficiently and soon agreed to partner with E&A on the project.
From late 2008 through early 2009, E&A worked on implementing the warehouse solution. E&A coordinated with SEE’s third party network services provider to configure a standard WiFi network and install access points in SEE’s warehouse. E&A’s Doug Crosby helped specify the handheld devices to be used by SEE’s workers to scan the bar code labels. Bill installed the Pro Warehouse application, provided onsite training to SEE end users and follow-up support after the initial go-live to make sure everything was functioning properly.
Bill explained how the system works. “We configured the handheld devices to login to the Pro Warehouse application installed on the Infor10 Distribution Express server,” said Bill. “Pro Warehouse accesses data within Infor10 Distribution Express for validation and verification purposes, writing to data files that Infor10 Distribution Express uses when confirming orders.” Bill said that future warehouse expansion can be easily accommodated by synchronizing additional access points to the already existing system at minimal cost to SEE.
With E&A’s solution in place, the results have been very positive. Now, SEE uses the handhelds to scan shipments as they are received in order to accurately capture items, quantities, and related information. This includes the all-important lot and serial numbers which are prevalent in the pharmaceuticals and medical supplies industry. “The bar code system is one of the best things we’ve ever done, if nothing else than to help with product recalls that are tied to specific lot and serial numbers,” stated Nikki. “With over 12,000 part numbers in our system, we have greater confidence in our ability to track inventory due to the higher level of accuracy that Pro Warehouse provides.”
Job satisfaction and worker productivity in the warehouse has improved, with the technology making it easier for SEE to rapidly get new employees online. “It’s amazing how well our warehouse workers have taken to the scanners. I almost think they’d take them home to sleep with!” remarked Gene Vaughn, SEE’s warehouse manager. “We had a new employee join us recently; we trained her in only a few hours but she’s already doing very well picking orders for us.” Gene went on to discuss the benefits of warehouse automation for both SEE and its customers. “It’s helped tremendously with pulling the right product every time,” said Gene. “For example, we stock 30 to 40 different kind of gloves but I can’t remember the last time we shipped out the wrong glove to a customer. Whereas before we might have had ten instances of misshipped items per week, now we have virtually zero. We simply don’t make mistakes like we used to before,” he emphasized.
Today, SEE ships over 56,000 packages a year with an astounding 99.9% accuracy rate. Yet, Gene hopes to improve even more. “We might have a dozen orders per year that gets sent to the wrong place, but I’m hoping the scanning system will completely eliminate that problem, too,” said Gene, who explained that SEE will soon use the scanner guns to eliminate the task of manually keying in order numbers. Gene stressed what’s at stake for SEE and its customers. “EMS people can’t wait. We might have to ship next-day air a case of defibrillation pads or IV catheters to Texas and lives could be at risk if the customer doesn’t get what they need in a timely manner,” he said.
On that point, Nikki detailed the dramatic improvements to its warehouse processes that SEE has achieved since pairing Pro Warehouse with Infor10 Distribution Express. “Before, we had a 24 to 48 hours shipping turnaround time. Now, we’re down to less than 24 hours with most orders going out the same day. When you’re pushing 100 to 150 orders every day, that’s a lot of paperwork and UPS packages – and we’re talking from two to 100 line item orders!” exclaimed Nikki. “It’s been a major accomplishment for us to successfully streamline our processes. I believe the changes are putting us above the competition.”
Finally, the level of traceability made possible with Pro Warehouse ensures that SEE is protected in case of a customer challenge. Information gathered by Pro Warehouse allows SEE’s customer service representatives (CSRs) to gain full visibility into Infor10 Distribution Express and assure customers about the precise lots and expiry dates associated with the products they may have purchased. This information empowers SEE’s CSRs to improve customer relationships while ensuring that all returns are handled as fairly and equitably as possible.
SEE Continuously Improves with E&A and Infor10 Distribution Express
By the latter half of the decade, SEE’s success had presented its talented management team with a multitude of challenges. To position the company for continued prosperity, a new building was opened; the already existing office and warehouse space was remodeled; an in-house pharmaceuticals department was started complete with a climate- and access-controlled room; a bid department was ramped up; a training facility was built; many new employees were hired and trained; among numerous other projects. All of this activity left precious little time available for SEE managers to focus on developing the company’s software applications.
In 2009, SEE contracted with Bill DeMars, an independent consultant who was charged with exploring how Infor10 Distribution Express could be further developed to support SEE’s needs. Bill soon began to work collaboratively with the E&A staff in Greensboro, championing a number of initiatives that have borne fruit for SEE.
One of the first areas identified for improvement was rebates which at the time was painstakingly handled using a manual process. “We were getting information to process rebates out of multiple spreadsheets,” recalled Nikki. “Then we’d make whatever changes the manufacturer wanted, make sure our numbers matched their numbers, and hope that we didn’t miss anything.” To rectify the situation, Bill DeMars met with E&A’s Dave Johndrow to specify how SEE’s rebates processes could be automated. Dave submitted a spec which was subsequently approved and passed to Jim for writing into code. The modification E&A delivered all but eliminated the possibility of error by extracting the relevant information from the Infor10 Distribution Express database including customers, dates, products, quantities and manufacturers. Infor10 Distribution Express now tells SEE precisely when and what information needs to be submitted to each manufacturer every month including how much money is expected in return.
Nikki estimates the rebates modification will save SEE hundreds of thousands in both labor costs and hard dollars. “It used to take our purchasing manager no less than ten working days each month to process rebates. Now it takes her no more than five hours total, meaning she can do more of the things we need her to do,” said Nikki. “We figured out that we had been leaving about $20 thousand on the table every month in rebates. Needless to say, the rebates mod has paid for itself!”
Learning how to take greater advantage of the Infor10 Distribution Express purchasing system’s feature/functionality was another priority for SEE. As SEE’s business volume grew it became apparent that activating the buying targets feature could provide significant benefits to the company. “We process approximately 400 purchase orders every week,” said Nikki. “Sometimes, we might have cut a PO to the same vendor every day, or even twice in the same day. We knew we needed to improve this! We worked with E&A to setup buying targets in Infor10 Distribution Express for the manufacturers who offer to pay full or partial freight, discounts, free goods or other benefits when their buying targets are reached. Our purchasers can now look in Infor10 Distribution Express to know, ‘We have to get to this dollar level before we send a purchase order.’ So the buying targets have definitely been a benefit,” she concluded.
Implementing a system to help SEE’s new “bid department” compete for new business was another project given a high priority. A majority of their largest customers such as state/local municipalities typically open up their EMS supply lists to bid, and those municipalities can award contracts to individual or multiple distributors. Since gross-profit margins are often low for this business, SEE needs to prepare these bid as efficiently as possible. E&A developed a “bid management solution” around the requirements prepared by SEE’s and their Business Development consultant Ashmak Inc., which has yielded very positive results. “The bid modification by E&A has more than paid for itself,” said Rhoda Holbrook, Customer Service Manager at SEE. “Before the modification, the preparation of a quote for bid was a manual process: you’d have to write down the information, prepare spreadsheets and handwritten notes to communicate the information to the salespeople; in many cases the notes would have to be faxed to manufacturers or salespeople for follow-up, then you’d have to enter the data into Infor10 Distribution Express as a quote, and so on. Now all you have to do is enter the product details into Infor10 Distribution Express; modify the pricing and rebate details; and when SEE is the successful winner of a bid you simply convert the quote to an order.” In the event that SEE is not the successful bidder, that information is captured in Infor10 Distribution Express so that future bids can be prepared based on historical competitive information which is unheard of in the medical industry. This process has evolved from a multiple week process to that of only a few days. SEE’s overall gross profit increased by 3 percentage points in one month through the requesting and receipt of manufacturer rebates that were previously not collected. Thanks to these efficiencies, the bid department has already participated in hundreds of bids, resulting in an increase in business with the expectation of becoming a profitable operation within six months of its launch in late 2009.
Improving access to information and teamwork between SEE’s sales and customer service departments was another management objective. The problem was that SEE’s sales representatives had become overly reliant on their own CSRs to provide them with timely information; their frequent calls to the customer service desk was draining resources that were needed to directly support the customer base. To correct this situation, SEE decided to supply its field sales representatives with laptops and secure, remote access to the Infor10 Distribution Express server so that they could work more independently while delivering better service to their customers.
Since the implementation of the solution, SEE’s salespeople have been empowered with the information they need to sell more effectively while drastically reducing the call volume at the customer service desk. E&A’s Adam Team has worked with SEE on the project. “Adam has helped implement the terminal server for our salespeople to access Infor10 Distribution Express,” said Nikki. “For us, the decision was a no-brainer. We benefit because now our sales reps are not interrupting our CSRs anymore, whereas before they would get called every 30 minutes or so. The laptops have enabled our salespeople to do more professional face-to-face selling at the customer site. They can look in Infor10 Distribution Express to view past orders, substitute items, and access other information that helps them do what they do best. Meanwhile, our CSRs can spend more time interacting with customers on the phone where they too can concentrate more on providing solutions, and not merely taking orders. It’s been a win-win for us!” she enthused.
Nikki also credits E&A’s Wendy Oakes for her persistence and ingenuity in helping SEE recently implement the Electronic Price Updates (EPU) feature in Infor10 Distribution Express. “Wendy analyzed our data and imported a test file of new items into Infor10 Distribution Express through the EPU,” explained Nikki. “Wendy kept at it until she got the bugs worked out and was certain it would work correctly for us. If Wendy hadn’t kept at it, we might have dropped the ball; we probably would have said, ‘Forget it and go back to the old way.’” Nikki further commented on the value that E&A’s consultants have provided to SEE. “We get the impression the people at E&A are outside-of-the-box thinkers, which has been useful for solving our everyday business challenges,” said Nikki.
Looking Ahead
SEE continues to seek out new opportunities to lower costs and improve efficiency. With encouragement and assistance from Bill DeMars and E&A’s Jim Morton, Nikki anticipates that activating the suggested reordering system in Infor10 Distribution Express will help SEE significantly pare down its inventory investment and free up capital for other uses. “We currently maintain $1.5 million inventory. We’d like to reduce that number by as much as half a million dollars over the next six months based on better ordering practices,” said Nikki. To that end, Jim recently worked with Nikki to review SEE’s reorder levels, making adjustments to help improve buying decisions and uploading the changes to Infor10 Distribution Express. “We understand the process will take time, but we believe we can use Infor10 Distribution Express to order smarter and not overstock. That’s one of the things we’re implementing now,” she continued.
SEE also plans to implement Infor ERP Storefront, an e-commerce solution that provides a world-class shopping experience on B2B and B2C web sites. To prepare for the project, Jim Morton and Danny Crews recently upgraded SEE to Infor10 Distribution Express version 7.6 so that it would be compatible with the latest version of Storefront; meanwhile, E&A’s Sam Neogi is working on the Storefront application to deliver the feature/functionality that SEE expects. “We are confident the Storefront will be a hit,” said Nikki. “We have so many customers out there who are begging us to let them be the test dummies! We anticipate the web site will enable us to accumulate more business from individuals and county organizations that have made it mandatory to purchase from distributors who can provide online access. With Storefront, our customers will be able to access up-to-the-minute information on open orders complete with shipments, tracking numbers, and so on. We will also do business more effectively with fire departments and other EMS professionals who work all hours and often get called to duty in the middle of placing their orders; Storefront will be able to hold onto these orders until our customers return,” she elaborated.
Nikki also sees a strategic role for the Web inasmuch as it will allow SEE’s salespeople to spend more time on higher-value sales while the web site processes routine orders for commodity items. “We look at the web site as a tool for the salespeople to stay focused on what they do best: selling capital equipment, not consumables like band-aids and splints,” said Nikki. “Our salespeople need more time to schedule meetings with EMS administrators where they can demonstrate products that can make a real difference for our customers. So we see the Storefront as another piece of a larger puzzle that assists both our salespeople and our customers.”
Underscoring the importance of running a better business with technology, Nikki told us about a dramatic event that unfolded when a particularly damaging hurricane struck the eastern seaboard in the past decade. “The National Guard landed Blackhawk helicopters in a ball field about ten miles away from our office because the emergency services team that needed the supplies could not get across the waterway,” said Nikki. “One of the most pressing needs was OB kits because the extreme pressure change was forcing pregnant women into labor under the most adverse conditions, as you can only imagine. Using Infor10 Distribution Express, we responded and were able to quickly load up two helicopters with all the supplies they needed. I will never forget the expressions of gratitude on the faces of the nurses because we were able to assist them in their hour of need. It was one of those moments I will never forget. It makes me proud to be part of the SEE team.”
E&A is honored to play a small part in helping SEE fulfill its important mission. To learn more about SEE, visit its web site at www.seequip.com