A voice-based system is transforming how one pharmaceutical distribution group works, writes Karlin Lillington
In a large Dublin pharmaceuticals warehouse, a worker races around on a forklift wearing a headset.
He isn't listening to music, but to a computer directing him to the location of the medications he needs to select to fulfil a customer order.
Here in Chapelizod, at Cahill May Roberts, replacing paperwork with Vocollect voice technology - a headset and a small boxy unit worn on a belt, in constant wireless communication with a PC - is helping keep patients safer and their medications supply reliable.
The worker travels from a cold storage vault full of vaccines and other perishables at one end, through aisle upon aisle of medications stretching in the other direction.
Once he reaches his destination, he speaks to the computer, confirming the product number and the amount of product on the shelves. After confirming the batch number and expiry date, he tells the computer how much of the product he has removed, and has the amount reconfirmed.
Then he is off down the aisles again, finding the next product for an order that may find its way at the end of the week into a prescription filled by a chemist in a town in the west of Ireland or a hospital in Dublin.
Cahill May Roberts is the Irish arm of international pharmaceuticals distribution group Celesio.
The Chapelizod division, along with three other Irish centres, is responsible for the distribution of more than 180,000 product units daily to pharmacies, hospitals and clinics.
"There's €150 million worth of products in this building," says Cahill May Roberts manager Liam Quinn. "We're turning €350 million in product per year. From that point of view, and because of the nature of the product, we have a need for accuracy."
Quinn says that if the workers don't pick the oldest product on the shelf, they risk having costly medications go out of date or run so close to their expiry date that they cannot be sold to patients, which in turn can leave patients without any medications at all.
Cold storage items such as vaccines are especially sensitive and must be constantly tracked to guarantee temperatures never fall below an acceptable level.
In addition, the potential for product recalls and the health implications for patients mean tight control is needed down to managing individual batch numbers.
"There's a huge onus on us to get the right product out at the right time," says Quinn.
The nature of the products, ever-increasing international regulatory demands for accountability and the need to squeeze greater efficiencies out of the low-margin warehousing business pushed Quinn to consider better tracking processes than the form-filling, paperwork-based methods that had been used for a century.
Quinn spent time evaluating a range of options and says he settled on voice-based Vocollect because barcode and scanning systems were expensive, requiring additional hardware, and were also unlikely to be adequate for more than five years. "As a solution it was a bit tired," he says.
Not that moving to voice was easy. It took about 10 months to get the system to operate smoothly (Quinn had estimated it would take three). Occasional minor discrepancies in batch numbers or stock counts that had crept in with the existing stock - due to handwriting being hard to read or a distraction causing someone to write the wrong number down - meant the voice system would come to a complete standstill.
Under the old paper-based routine, such small glitches would eventually be sorted out when a worker next checked the stock, but the Vocollect system's inbuilt security actually shuts down an order if it encounters such discrepancies, which then have to be rectified by a supervisor.
In addition, the introduction of the newfangled voice technology into a 106-year-old company, which has workers with decades of service, caused some ripples of discontent at first.
"It was a massive culture change. We've had to manage that and bring the workforce in," says Quinn. But he says the company now operates with 99.64 per cent accuracy, with complete control over the entire process of fulfilling an order for customers.
That level of control and assurance has attracted the interest of numerous organisations, including pharma companies such as Pfizer, which has visited the Cahill site to observe Vocollect in action.
For their part, workers seem genuinely pleased with the new system.
Gone is the stack of orders the workers used to carry, and, better yet, the burden of completing the paperwork that carefully documents every order.
"I'm very much a traditionalist. I'd be very anti anything like this," admits Donal McCarthy, a 38-year veteran of Cahill May Roberts. "But I have to say this is fantastic. I didn't think it would be so adaptable."
His colleague Michael Donnigan, with 33 years at the firm, agrees. "This is the best change ever. The paperwork was heavy. I'd never go back to picking orders with dockets."
McCarthy says the tediousness has gone out of the job. "I could have spent four hours a day filling out forms." He lifts his headset in one hand. "There was a little bit of trepidation - change brings fear. But we're compatible now."