How a Distribution Planning System is important for Medical Lab Testing

Remote testing facilities for Medical labs are the future. However, the remote testing facilities demand one more subject aside from the obvious ones — a solid Distribution Planning System. How does an automation system massively enable an entire industry in its moving towards the future? Let’s dive into the answer.

What is a Distribution Planning System?

A Distribution Planning System is a piece of software that automates the planning, routing, and administration of a company’s distribution cycle. It provides the organization with management tools, critical data, and analytics that may be utilized to make critical choices.

Distribution Planning for Medical Lab Testing

Medical lab testing has taken a new turn in the entire pandemic situation. Labs now function remotely, providing their services without the customer needing to visit the lab themselves. This procedure begins with the customer allotting an appointment, and ends with the samples reaching the lab. This procedure can take a lot of time to process in every step and be very easy to mess up. What a distribution planning system does for this process is that it takes the steps that are hard to maintain manually, automates them to the benefit of the patient/customer, and enables medical labs to handle requests at scale. It actively monitors and manages the logistics and data collection & management part of the remote lab testing process, massively optimizing the experience for both the company and the consumer.

How does a Distribution Planning System work with Medical Lab Testing?

A distribution planning system benefits the now-relevant system of remote handling of medical samples. For example, after a customer requests an appointment with a medical lab, representatives from that lab visit the customer at their address wearing appropriate gear to take samples. They then take the samples and take them back to the lab. While the process might be simple, it is not designed to run at scale.

Order Management:

Order management for this process works as the brain for the entire chain. The distribution planning system comes with order management and compilation algorithms built in it, which automates the work process of manual order management. It is able to receive orders and assign them accordingly, which takes away the time lag that usually occurs when the procedure is handled manually. Order management also manages the main data flow of the system, as it contains and manages all the customer data for the company. Order management is the initiating sequence of data management and the data that it works with trickles down to multiple parts of other processes.

Location Management:

The location of the customers plays a much bigger role than a lot of other industries in medical lab testing, as personnel from the lab have to reach out to the customer’s living addresses. With efficient location management, the location data of the customers are received and stored for the lab’s dispatch purposes. Using this information, the labs can work with their logistics accordingly, ensuring the fastest and most cost-efficient ways of providing their service.

Smart Dispatch:

One of the key features of a distribution planning system working with medical lab testing is its smart and efficient dispatch system. Location of the appointments and locations of lab personnel are tagged and matched accordingly, so that the customer that requests an appointment is connected to an employee that is nearest to them. This not only saves time by a long margin, but also greatly improves customer service. As delays are kept to a minimum and travel distances are cut down as much as possible, this makes sure the employee reaches the customer in an apt time margin and travel costs are kept to a minimum as well.

The process of handling orders and handling logistics simultaneously can be a tough task to deal with. But with an automated distribution management system handling these processes for you, the task becomes a lot easier to run at scale. Automation always means time-saving, as the workload is freed up and manual workforce can be deployed somewhere else. Software taking care of this part also means data management and handling will be much more accurate without room for human error. If your medical lab is in need of taking a step further in the field of remote lab testing, you will get everything you need with Nuport.

Nuport with its geocoded order management and routing tools, makes sure your personnel are always on time. It promises the best use of smart dispatch, making sure you get all the benefits from integrating a distribution planning system into your medical lab testing business. Schedule a demo today!