The Company Serving more than one million customers in the past 15 years, Liberty Medical is a rapidly growing, leading provider of direct-to-consumer medical products, prescription medications and services. The company is primarily focused on helping seniors with chronic diseases achieve the active and healthy lifestyles they desire. Liberty Medical is the leading direct-to-home Medicare provider of diabetes testing supplies in the United States. Based in Port St. Lucie Florida, the company s home-delivery programs help patients comply with their physician-prescribed treatment plans by ensuring that adequate quantities of testing supplies are always at hand.
The Challenge In its early years as a small mail-order provider of prescription medications, Liberty Medical s fulfillment and packaging process worked perfectly. As items for each patient order were assembled, accompanying documents generated by several different applications were sent to a single printer. With its single printer queue, these documents, including a packing list, usage instructions, order receipt and other mandated medical notices, HIPAA compliance statement, and other warnings, always printed in sequence for each individual customer order on a Lexmark monochrome laser printer. Thanks in part to a popular national advertising campaign, Liberty Medical s business has grown dramatically now processing and shipping nearly 4,000 orders every day, up nearly 50 percent in just 12 months. To meet this increasing demand, Liberty Medical expanded its order fulfillment operation, hiring more employees, adding more packaging stations., and installing additional high performance Lexmark monochrome laser printers to meet demand.
Success brings changes, and for Liberty Medical, it also brought challenges. As it rolled out these additional printers and defined new queues to generate documents for multiple patient orders simultaneously, a limitation of the company s print server environment quickly became evident. Owing to the nature of network printer queues and operating system based print spooler software, documents for each order no longer printed together. Each application s output was being redirected to the next available Lexmark printer necessitating hand collation to gather documents for each order. "This became a manual process, requiring us to assign people to aggregate sheets and double check shipments," said John Hegner, Liberty Medical s Vice President of Technology Services. It was a nightmare and a very tedious process that became unmanageable as we continued to gain more and more new customers. The integrity of the documents required for each customer order is critical and much of it is confidential."
Putting the wrong documents in the wrong box could be a costly mistake and could jeopardize Liberty Medical s reputation. Further complicating matters, Liberty Medical has a robust legacy application for processing orders. Any new solution that would solve its printing challenges could not require modification of its existing code. Liberty Medical needed to find a way to increase printing capacity in a manner that would aggregate documents for each order as a single print stream, without modifying its legacy code. "And we needed to do this quickly and affordably." said Hegner. The Solution Solving Liberty Medical s business challenge required more than the simple addition of more printers. To deal with rising demand, multiple form types and its printer queue issue, the company worked with Lexmark medical industry specialists to craft an ideal solution. But printing the output is only half of Liberty Medical s challenge. Lexmark teamed up with Plus Technologies to provide a complete solution. To meet the company s unique and complex printing needs. Lexmark installed several high-performance, 45 page-per-minute monochrome laser printers equipped with multiple input trays. Each tray holds a different type and size of paper stock, including plain paper, heavyweight card stock, prescription labels and die-cut adhesive shipping labels. "Our applications know which tray to pull from, assuring that documents print on the correct media automatically," said Hegner. Managing the printer queues to aggregate documents for each order required OM Plus ", an advanced output management, print spooling, and document delivery solution developed by Plus Technologies. Without impacting application software programs, OM Plus receives print jobs and replaces the operating system s native print spooler with its powerful, highly customizable environment.
"This software continuously monitors print jobs and looks for the unique customer number that is present on every document we print." said Hegner. "It intercepts the print jobs, automatically sorts and aggregates documents by customer number and then redirects the entire group to one printer as a single, uninterrupted stream." Working together, engineers from Lexmark, Plus Technologies and Liberty Medical completed the entire project - including problem definition, installation, testing and placing the solution into production - in just two weeks. The Results With its fleet of multi-tray Lexmark monochrome laser printers, Liberty Medical is equipped to handle its growing customer base automatically printing order forms, packing lists, prescription and shipping labels and mandated medical notices on the appropriate media type. Through the use of Plus Technologies OM Plus print spooler and print queue management software, documents for each customer order are consolidated automatically and once again print as a group. Manual collation has been eliminated, leading to greater efficiency and accuracy and avoiding the hiring of additional staff. I am impressed that Lexmark and Plus Technologies immediately understood our challenge and worked together seamlessly as a single team to develop and deploy a complete solution in just two weeks," said Hegner. "This is a scalable solution, so as our business continues to grow, we can simply add more Lexmark printers to meet demand." Hegner says he didn t need to evaluate other printing solution companies because he was already convinced that this challenge could be solved by Lexmark and Plus Technologies.
"This has been the perfect solution for us," said Hegner. "Our problem was fixed once and we haven t had to think about it again. It has paid for itself many, many times over."
Pleased with the results the Lexmark printers are providing. Hegner has purchased 20 additional devices for its pharmacy operations and many more for general office operations. For Liberty Medical, its rise from a local company to national prominence continues to simplify life for millions of customers. Backed by the reliability of Lexmark printers and the power of OM Plus print spooler and queue management software, those customers are assured their orders are processed and fulfilled quickly and accurately.
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