Home Med-Equip Co. Gains Visibility, Reduces Global Footprint, and Meets Time Windows with Roadnet Anywhere^®

As a family-owned operation, Home Med-Equip Co. (HME) knows the importance of delivering personalized care and honoring a commitment made to customers. Since 1981, HME has been the San Francisco Bay Area’s leading independent provider of home medical equipment and durable medical supplies. Serving over 20,000 customers a year, families, hospitals, and physicians have come to depend on HME’s commitment to on-time deliveries of critical medical supplies. HME turned to UPS Logistics Technologies to help fulfill this commitment by reducing their routing time and gaining visibility into their delivery day.

With three locations and business growing, HME’s Director of Operations, Chad Moshier, began looking for the perfect delivery system—one that combined GPS, route planning and dispatch, report modules, and affordability. He found the answer in UPS Logistics Technologies’ web-based software solution, Roadnet Anywhere^®. “Roadnet Anywhere is a robust system. The reporting features, customizable fields, and the emphasis on route costs fit our needs. Customer Support has been great and the overall package fit for our business,” says Moshier.

With Roadnet Anywhere, HME has gained visibility into their routing, providing them with a competitive edge to make strategic decisions. In a dynamically changing customer base where orders can be placed throughout the day, HME can now view a driver’s location and have the driver make a critical stop. “If a customer’s oxygen concentrator stops running, we can now get to them quicker than before with Roadnet Anywhere. It makes life easier on our customers. We can see all of our time windows and meet those time windows,” Moshier explains. This is a critical factor in an industry where making on-time deliveries is essential to meeting the expectations of customers and referral partners. HME can deliver 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with their on-call system.

Being in the business of delivering home medical supplies, such as oxygen systems and other respiratory equipment, HME is concerned with reducing their global footprint and keeping the air clean as they make their deliveries.

HME uses a fleet of cargo vans that run completely on compressed natural gas – one of the cleanest burning fuels on earth. Making the transition to Roadnet Anywhere greatly reduced the route overlap drivers experienced, the miles driven, and the amount of fuel consumed. Moshier agrees, “Before Roadnet Anywhere, we’d look at a map, figure out where the deliveries would be, and send the drivers off in a general direction. We never knew if we routed them in a criss-crossing way.” Cutting costs is crucial in an industry where HME is expected to deliver, pick up, and service equipment virtually for free. The combined implementation of new technologies such as Roadnet Anywhere, compressed natural gas at $1.75/gallon, and the utilization of innovative homefill oxygen systems, have placed HME at the forefront of their industry by performing less costly and more efficient deliveries.

Improved driver performance has been an additional bonus after implementing the software. When asked about the drivers’ transition from their previously manual method of routing to the software, Moshier recalls, “At first the drivers were a bit skeptical, but now they love it. We pump everyone up at team meetings with the report statistics- how many miles were driven and how many deliveries we made that week. It makes the job fun, because people want to perform better.” In fact, according to Moshier, the drivers love the durable phones they use with Roadnet Anywhere so much that they fondly refer to it as “the Bat Phone”.

For Moshier, Roadnet Anywhere has improved his day-to-day routing process and management. Routing time has been cut in half— allowing him to have more energy and time to tackle other aspects of the business. “I highly recommend using Roadnet Anywhere. You are missing out on a lot without it. You could be using more energy for other activities besides trying to figure out where your vehicles need to be throughout the day. The system allows you to take the thinking right out of it. All you have to do is plug-in addresses.”

“If someone is not involved with Roadnet Anywhere,” concluded Moshier. “They really need to be—especially in this industry.”