Precise Delivery Service
In everyday life, ordering furniture is second nature to us all. At the appointed time, the provider delivers and assembles it. Doctors and hospitals should also be able to rely on a great service when they opt for ZEISS medical technology. Since 2014, a European-wide logistics strategy has been ensuring that the high quality which ZEISS demands from its own products is also guaranteed in the delivery service.
Service engineer Matteo Benassi
Matteo Benassi checks his watch. It’s Friday morning, ten o’clock on the dot. The ZEISS field service engineer is standing in front of Ophthalmologist Dr. Riccardo Chiari’s practice in the small Italian town of Borgo Val Di Taro. Just then, a truck pulls in at the side of the street. The back door opens and two men unload a pallet bearing the ZEISS name.
A week before, ZEISS customer service arranged the exact time of the delivery with Dr. Chiari. Therefore, Dr. Chiari had scheduled a time for system briefings and an initial training session with Matteo Benassi. “For me too, it’s important to be able to rely on the delivery deadlines,” says the field service engineer. So he was there at exactly the right time to immediately connect the system and explain its functions.
This smooth process would not have been possible without professional sales logistics. ZEISS Medical Technology rightly claims to be the innovation leader in many areas – but so far, not in sales logistics.
However, it is important to place value on exact planning and reliable collaboration as early as the delivery stage. At this point, ZEISS can create an experience that customers will remember and thus lay the foundation for a trust-based relationship – exactly as happened with Dr. Chiari in Borgo Val Di Taro. In the meantime, his delivery has been positioned in its future home in the doctor’s office. The delivery men unpack the Humphrey Field Analyzer (HFA) and take the competitor’s old system with them at the same time. Matteo Benassi starts up the analyzer, tests the functions and explains the first steps to Dr. Chiari.
Customer satisfaction starts with the delivery
“In other technology companies, customer-oriented delivery service is now standard,” says Stefan Thorand. Working from Jena, he is responsible for cross-site process optimization in the Operations area. “ZEISS Medical Technology is now catching up in this area” – from now on, it will meet the same high quality standards in the European delivery service that the company demands from its own products. Stefan Thorand initiated a project enabling deliveries that can be precisely planned to be sent directly to customers from production in Jena or Oberkochen.
Therefore, ZEISS has been working with TENESO Europe SE, a special provider for the logistics of sensitive systems since spring 2014. TENESO is a European logistics network that undertakes deliveries to the customers of its highly specialized partners in their respective countries. “In TENESO, we’ve got a partner for which handling medical systems and working with hospitals is part of everyday life,” says Stefan Thorand. Thus, alongside delivery on the desired date and at a specific time, the service also includes the delivery men from TENESO bringing the system inside and positioning it where the doctor will use it in the future. They also dispose of the packaging – a service which customers, especially small doctor’s practices, appreciate.
Ophthalmologist Dr. Ricardo Chiari was delighted at the delivery that arrived on schedule and was immediately assembled.
Delivery with detours
Direct deliveries were previously organized via the standard service providers of ZEISS. “But with this standard, we cannot specify a precise delivery date. We can only provide a timeframe of about two days within which the system arrives at the customer – which is far from exact,” says Stefan Thorand. Usually, the system is not brought into the examination room – it is left in the entrance area. “Or else we send the systems from the plant in Germany to the Sales and Service Companies (SSCs) in the respective country, which then organize transport to the customer,” says Stefan Thorand. This detour means that there is a delay before the customer receives the system, and that the employees in the SSC have more organizational work to do. “The direct deliveries by Teneso allow us to unburden the SSCs as regards handling, warehousing and schedule monitoring, while providing customers with exact deliveries and additional services” summarizes Stefan Thorand.
Matteo Benassi can confirm this from his own first-hand experience. He says: “From the viewpoint of the SSCs, the new logistics strategy contributes to a professional collaboration with our customers that starts as soon as the delivery takes place.”
