Customer Case Study

Medela Inc.
McHenry, IL, USA

Performance Made Positive: Premier Breast Pump Maker Positions for Growth with QAD
The Company: Innovative Products to Support Breastfeeding
For over 20 years, nursing mothers around the world have turned to Medela for breast pumps and breastfeeding accessories. Medela’s commitment to quality, innovation and leading-edge support programs has made it the major supplier of breast pumps to healthcare facilities and retail outlets in the United States, and one of the most respected brands in the industry. Medela’s parent company, Medela AG, was founded in 1961, in Zug, Switzerland. The family-owned company operates manufacturing facilities in Switzerland and the United States, with subsidiaries in Europe, North America and Asia, employing over 600 people worldwide.

Medela redirected its selection process, focusing on partnering with an ERP vendor that understood its business, offering applications that were simple and straightforward. The company also wanted an implementation consultant that would truly be a partner and remain accountable beyond go-live.

The Solution: A True Partner, that Listens and Delivers
Medela demanded a system that would support the unique needs of a life sciences manufacturer, and a platform to support the future growth of the business. The company took a closer look at a solution that it had not considered before: QAD.

“We can now conduct business in a manner that more closely matches our customers’ needs.”
Sam Levey, Vice President of Engineering, Medela

The Challenge: The High Risk of Business Improvement
As Medela matured from a small company into a global enterprise, it outgrew its technology and processes. In a rigorous selection process focused on Tier I ERP providers, the company chose Oracle.

“Risk mitigation is where QAD is truly different. I think that’s powerful.”
Carr Lane Quackenbush, President, Medela

Decision makers quickly recognized that the simplicity and clarity of QAD enterprise applications would meet their business needs and deliver lower total cost of ownership. Just as attractive to Medela was the ability to work directly with QAD Consulting as its implementation partner. “There are two really important aspects of the purchase decision. The first is technical: it’s got to have the functionality we need to run our business. The second is implementation and installation. Both of those represent huge business risks,” says Quackenbush. QAD Consulting took a practical approach to running the business on a day-to-day basis. Drawing on deep vertical expertise, QAD professionals helped Medela apply best practices to improving and streamlining end-to-end processes, making prescriptive recommendations on the best ways to configure and implement their QAD software. Reviewing process inputs and outputs, and creating test cases based on that information, were key to accelerating the implementation and ensuring its success.

Unfortunately, Medela soon discovered that its new system was not a good fit for its business. The third-party consultant had done a standardized implementation that left Medela with a complex system that did not meet its needs as a life sciences manufacturer. “That installation put this entire company at risk—and all of our customers,” says company president Carr Lane Quackenbush. Four weeks after go-live Medela went back to its legacy system and renewed its search for the right enterprise solution.

The Benefits: Unifying the Enterprise Positions It for Growth
For Medela, discipline around the value of customer intimacy is paramount. Working with QAD Consulting to automate and integrate business processes from order management through fulfillment has helped the company improve its focus on customer care and service. QAD Consulting has also helped Medela improve its EDI processes, putting the company in a much better position to meet and exceed the requirements of its large retail customers. The complicated pricing structures common to the life sciences industry can be difficult to manage consistently; with its old system, Medela frequently lost revenue opportunities. Now Medela can effectively manage its pricing to provide the best value to its customers, while maintaining profitable margins for the company. With QAD, Medela has increased visibility into supplier, inventory, customer, and financial data, significantly improving reporting capabilities and supporting the ability to make better business decisions. In addition, QAD has helped Medela ensure its ability to consistently satisfy FDA requirements. Sam Levey, Vice President of Engineering for Medela, says QAD is much more than software. “What I really appreciate about QAD Consulting is their commitment to the solution and their approach, which is thorough and effective. They get themselves off the critical path very quickly,” says Levey. He adds, “We can now conduct business in a manner that more closely matches our customers’ needs.” “Risk mitigation is where QAD is truly different. I think that’s powerful,” says Quackenbush, adding, “We’re extremely grateful for what QAD did for us. We think other companies could benefit.”

Highlights
Company
Company Name Industry Products Medela, Inc. Life Sciences/Medical Equipment Breast pumps and medical suction devices

Solutions
QAD Enterprise Applications QAD MFG/PRO eB2 QAD Customer Self-Service QAD Business Intelligence QAD Advanced Pricing Medical QAD Warehousing QAD SSM QAD Consulting HP9000 N Class HP-UX English One Immediate

Implementation Partner Hardware Environment Languages Number of Sites Time-to-Benefit

Results
• Implementation low risk, with minimal disruption of the business • Manual processes automated and integrated • Visibility into information across the enterprise • Improved EDI processes • Improved serialization processing • Lower Work In Process (WIP) inventory • Manufacturing operations streamlined • More effective sales processes • Satisfy FDA validation requirements • Support for ‘Customer Intimacy’ initiatives • Company well-positioned for growth

The Future: Growing Medela’s Vision
As Medela expands its market focus to include large retailers with exacting fulfillment requirements, both Quackenbush and Levey agree that Medela is well positioned for the future. “We’ve historically supplied hospitals, GPOs, prime vendors, and a few thousand fairly small customers. Now, we’re going more and more into supplying the bigger retail chains—and that was a shock at first. Meeting their requirements, and fulfilling what were, for us, huge single-time orders, was a challenge. To advance on EDI and anything that helps fulfillment is a big change, and a requirement that the software has to support,” says Quackenbush. And, he says, Medela is succeeding: “We won the Target award for Number One Supplier in our category for 2006. We were 100 percent in compliance with their fulfillment requirements, and several other metrics.”

Produced by QAD Global Marketing • 100 Innovation Place, Santa Barbara, CA USA 93018 • QAD is a trademark of QAD Inc. All other product or company names appearing in this publication are used for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners • © 2007 QAD Inc. Item 73-2055A