Getting to Know You

Today, the Jacksonville, Fla.-based company controls 15 percent of thephysician supply business and competes directly with 10 otherdistributors, including divisions of such big name companies asMcKessonHBOC and Cardinal Health. To differentiate itself from itscompetitors and crack bigger accounts, PSS launched two portals,MyPSS.com in December 2000 and MyDIOnline eight months later. Itcustomizes these portals according to each customer's practice typeand brands the pages with the customer's name or logo.

Small private medical practices and large health-care organizationsalike use MyPSS.com to order more than 56,000 products includingeverything from basic bandages and syringes to test tubes and petridishes. Radiologists use MyDIOnline (the DI stands for diagnosticimaging) to select from more than 8,000 SKUs including mammographicand X-ray equipment, film and chemicals. The portals are built onBEA's Web Logic Application Server and run on BEA's commerce componentframework and personalization server. Customer information is storedin a centralized Oracle database. The company's ERPERP system, sales-force automation application and databases are pulled together usingIBM's MQ Series middleware. Alles zu ERP auf CIO.de

When a customer first registers to use one of the catalogs, sayMyPSS.com, she can choose to see only the products that are relevantto her practice type. Once she begins placing orders, PSS maintains areal-time list of all the products the physician ordered during thepast 18 months ranked in descending order by quantity. This section,called MyItems, makes it a lot easier for a doctor to find the 20items he has purchased (out of a catalog of 56,000). PSS can also usethe list to show one dermatologist what her colleagues arebuying.

Wayne Meyerson, director of e-business for PSS, says therecommendations encourage people to shop more. "Because we make it soeasy for people to buy online, we see a 20 percent higher average sizeorder on MyPSS.com as opposed to through the traditional methods ofthe phone and sales rep," he says.

As an added advantage, PSS can use the personalization information itcollects to determine whether a customer is a member of a smallprivate practice or belongs to a much larger clinical system. If thelatter is the case, David Ramsey, CIO of PSS World Medical, alertsPSS's corporate accounts staff, who then attempt to open more accountsacross that entire clinical system.