For home-bound and hospital based patients, the dependable delivery of same day and next day respiratory and other medical supplies is a must.  With dozens of vehicles in its fleet, a highly congested delivery area, and a large number of time-based stops, Landauer Metropolitan, Inc. (LMI) needed a more efficient routing system and a way to track their drivers’ real-time progress throughout the day. Through UPS Logistics Technologies, LMI added critical efficiency and transparency to their operations, allowing the company and its customers to breathe easier.

Currently, LMI is the largest privately held home medical equipment company in the New York metropolitan area. Founded as Landauer Hospital Supplies, a sole proprietorship in 1906, LMI rounded out its first century with 250 employees, three service locations, 70,000 customers and more than 500 deliveries each day.

Prior to implementing UPS Logistics Technologies tools, assessing the reliability of its deliveries was a challenge for LMI.  The company employs a third party delivery vendor, and making sure those drivers are getting the job done is a top priority.  Patrick Mullally, LMI’s VP of Information Technology says, “We make a lot of time stop based deliveries—oxygen and other essential supplies—but we had no idea whether those deliveries were being made on time, unless of course, we got a complaint call from a customer after the fact.”

Mullally notes that such complaints could not be readily answered, causing additional delays. “When we received calls from customers asking when their deliveries would arrive, our customer service representative would have to put that customer on hold and call dispatch, who in turn would have to call the driver.  By the time the information got back to the customer service representative, it was five or ten minutes later.  Not only did the customer have to wait, but that representative couldn’t take any additional calls, so that other calls coming in for new orders would back up. It was frustrating.”

After seeing a demo of the products, LMI purchased Roadnet, Roadnet Info Center, and MobileCast in December of 2005, and had these solutions fully implemented by May 2006, planning delivery routes and tracking LMI’s fleet of 47 trucks.

LMI has seen a number of tangible benefits from planning daily routes with Roadnet and making these routes visible to the entire organization through the Roadnet Info Center. By logistically streamlining stops, late evening deliveries have been virtually eliminated. “Our drivers are independent and paid by the stop. We want to be able to give them more stops so their workday is more efficient for them—with Roadnet, they can get on the road faster and get finished sooner,” Mullally says.

In addition, Roadnet has helped to flag incorrect delivery addresses that can bog down a delivery route and waste valuable time.  “Before Roadnet, when the delivery addresses would come out in the morning, we didn’t know if they were accurate or not until the drivers were out on the road trying to find the location. Now the addresses are all geo-coded, so if they’re not right, the system highlights them for dispatch,” says Mullally. “This cuts out 10 or 15 impossible deliveries per day.”

Most important is how tracking deliveries through MobileCast has improved customer service for LMI.  MobileCast works by ensuring that each driver stays on schedule stop by stop, and will update and refresh future stops based on the real-time data. It has given LMI the opportunity to be proactive in their customer service— notifying a customer with information about delivery time changes prior to receiving a customer complaint.

Patrick Mullally agrees that MobileCast has enabled LMI to raise the bar on its quality of service—a key differentiator in standing out from other medical supply home delivery companies. “A full 25% of our deliveries need to take place at a specific time,” he says. “For example, a hospital may not be able to discharge a patient until our equipment arrives. If we don’t make those times and the patient ends up in the hospital another day, both the patient and hospital are very angry and significant hospital costs are incurred.”

“With MobileCast and the Roadnet products, we’re getting almost no complaint calls about late deliveries,” says Mullally. “Now we can put the driver in the right place at the right time.”