DeVilbiss Healthcare, which designs, manufactures and markets medical products for the respiratory needs of patients in institutional and homecare settings, selected Microsoft Dynamics AX and implementation partner Business & Decision. The first phase went live in July this year.
As part of the separation from Sunrise Medical, DeVilbiss sought to select and implement a global solution suited to the needs of a medical device manufacturer. As a part of the separation process, DeVilbiss had only a short window of access to the parent company's systems and therefore needed to select and implement a new operating backbone in a compressed timeframe.
The Solution footprint includes Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009, FRx 6.7, RFSmart Data Collection, and MOSS 2007 (SharePoint) along with the complete implementation services associated with delivering the solution footprint globally. DeVilbiss says the primary reasons for choosing Dynamics AX were its complete suite of functionality that covered everything from manufacturing through to international financial consolidation; the benefits of the Microsoft technology stack; the inherent flexibility within the AX platform; and the overall cost effectiveness of the complete solution.
During the analysis of DeVilbiss' needs and the subsequent proposition of the Microsoft solution, Business & Decision (B&D) played a vital advisory role and demonstrated the business understanding and insights that DeVilbiss felt made B&D the right choice to implement the solution. The implementation project had a broad functional scope that needed to be deployed in a tight timeline. The initial Phase 1 required that all business operations in the US headquarters and the largest part of the European operations go live in a 6 month window. This goal was successfully achieved and DeVilbiss went live in July 2010 as planned. Phase 2 of the project will be to roll out the solution to the balance of the DeVilbiss operations.
Steve Amelio, CFO at DeVilbiss comments, "The implementation project was such a great success due to the close collaboration between DeVilbiss and B&D. Both sides brought their top talent to the table and the teams worked tirelessly to achieve the goals".
Going live in the timeline planned allowed DeVilbiss to end its dependency on existing systems and to begin to operate as a completely independent entity. Not only did the implementation project go live according to plan, with very minimal issues, but DeVilbiss has already begun to see business process improvements. Enhanced financial visibility as well as an overall increase in business process efficiency has already been realized says the company. As a direct result, DeVilbiss has experienced an increase in shipping throughput that has exceeded those possible on their legacy systems.
