June 07, 2022

THE RESCUES OF THE EMERGENCY SECURITIES: HOW 1A MEDIZINTECHNIK DIGITIZED THE SALES OF EMERGENCY EQUIPMENT WITH THE SHOPMACHER AND UNDERGOED A DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION THEMSELVES

1A Medizintechnik launched its first online shop for emergency medicine shortly before the corona pandemic. The initial investments paid off within a year. But the company is also benefiting elsewhere from its first digitization steps.

ABOUT 1A MEDIZINTECHNIK

For more than 20 years, the Bocholt-based family company 1A Medizintechnik has been equipping rescue services and emergency physicians and occupational safety with high-quality first-aid products. Because some of the more than 30 employees have worked in the rescue service for many years themselves, they know the requirements of the industry first-hand, can provide optimal advice and training and provide the optimal solution based on individual requirements. The company now processes over 200 orders a day. A short line and a close relationship with the customer are still crucial.

Challenge

In order to increasingly open up the private sector as a target group for their own emergency range in addition to fire brigades and rescue stations, the company owners Annette and Markus Nieuwenhuis decided in autumn 2019 to digitize their sales. The corona pandemic that broke out a few months later was a baptism of fire for the shop that had just been launched.

Implementation

The core target group of fire brigades and rescue stations is still extremely analogue. The available computers are often technically outdated and in some camps there is still no WLAN connection. The usual ordering process therefore consisted of simply calling the sales department or writing a fax.

For this reason, 1A Medizintechnik went step-by-step on the path to digitization and kept its ear very close to the market. It all started with an online ordering tool in which companies could enter their order numbers and which then generated an email to the B2B provider. But customers wanted alternative products with prices to be displayed when a product was sold out. In addition, delivery times and packaging units should be clearly visible. Further information about the products was also on the customers’ wish list.

With the help of SHOPMACHER, the B2B shop based on Shopware 6 was therefore constantly expanded. A specialty are the dynamic product lists, which can be used, for example, to compile tenders with the help of tags and filters.

Another novelty is a PWA app that employees of the rescue stations can use to record the required products on site without internet access. For this purpose, separate QR codes were attached to the shelves in the warehouse for each product, which simply have to be scanned for an order. As soon as the mobile device connects to the Internet, the order is then triggered. In this way, employees save time walking from the warehouse to the office and reordering products written on slips of paper. The vision of 1A Medizintechnik is to do away with the ordering process entirely and to have repeat orders run automatically via the goods management systems of the guards.

Brief overview of the steps of the ordering process in the PWA:

Step 4: Place order

Parallel to the expansion of the shop, the B2B customers received extensive training in how to operate the shop, with the help of training manuals and on-site presentations. This goes down very well with the guards. The labor-intensive ordering processes in particular can be mapped well online. And acquiring new customers via Google during the corona pandemic also worked almost automatically. After all, the core range of 1A Medizintechnik, masks, disinfectants & Co. was one of the most popular products during Covid-19.

Result

1A Medizintechnik amortized the initial investment of 500,000 euros in just one year. 25 percent of new customers found the shop via a Google search, and many existing customers are now increasingly ordering digitally. In addition, the introduction of the online shop also ensured process automation in-house. An order now goes all the way to the warehouse without anyone seeing it first. The sellers also benefit from the web shop because for the first time they can show customers product suggestions by simply emailing them a link to the product detail page in the shop.

CHARACTERISTICS