HERE to enhance supply chain visibility of Siemens Healthineers medical equipment

May 5, 2021: HERE Technologies, the location data and technology platform, on Tuesday (May 4) announced a collaboration with Siemens Healthineers, the medical technology company, to optimize aspects of logistics and supply chain operations for its customer services unit.

The customer services unit of Siemens Healthineers is responsible for more than one million service parts deliveries per year. The global transportation of service parts, particularly the on-site deliveries, from central warehouses to an installed base of several hundred thousand systems in hospitals and laboratories needs to run smoothly to ensure on-time availability of parts for the customer services engineers on site.

Delays during the delivery process or parts ending up in the wrong locations lead to additional effort in terms of searching for parts on-site or even the risk of a loss of parts. This could mean wasted time or longer service slots for the installation services, resulting in less productivity and additional costs. Therefore, visibility of spare parts along the entire supply chain – both outdoor and indoor - is critical to ensure seamless business operations between the customer services unit of Siemens Healthineers and their end customers.

In order to address this challenge, Siemens Healthineers contributed their expertise and requirements to HERE to be able to design a shipment visibility solution for tracking and monitoring of location, condition and ETA of medical equipment service parts, bringing real-time, end-to-end visibility into the outbound supply chain. To achieve this, a smart sensor tracking device was developed to enable complete shipment condition monitoring with global connectivity and the ability to record data when offline. Based on HERE Tracking technology, Siemens Healthineers Customer Services engineers are now able to track the location of service parts during transit and after delivery inside a hospital and monitor their condition in real-time.

Fred Hessabi, chief customer officer at HERE, said, “Accurate shipment visibility crucially provides valuable support to healthcare technicians around the world in the tracking and maintenance of time-critical, high- value medical equipment from warehouses to hospitals.”

Heiko Ansorge, global head of service supply chain solutions, customer services managed logistics at Siemens Healthineers, said, “Through our relationship with HERE, Siemens Healthineers can inform hospitals and technicians ahead of time about any early or delayed shipment arrivals."

"Our co-created trackers can even inform our technicians if a shipment has been delivered to the right floor and room, without having to install any additional infrastructure or anchor devices. All these optimizations result in reducing medical machine downtime, improving maintenance performance and ensuring that the technicians’ time on-site is optimized,” he added.

The solution will be rolled out by Siemens Healthineers in Europe, first for ground transportation and then with selected air carriers later on in 2021. The rollout for the rest of the world will follow in 2022.