Up Close and Personal with Customers at SAPPHIRE NOW: McKesson

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If you have been treated for an illness in a hospital or been prescribed a medication in the USA, chances are you were an end customer of McKesson’s.  At 175 years old, McKesson is the oldest and largest USA health care company (14th Forbes Fortune 500), distributing medications to over 40,000 locations, and servicing more than 70% of mid-large size hospitals with its information management systems.  Since lives depend on accurate information, McKesson takes the management of its more than 100,000 daily orders shipped, involving over 1.5 million lines of data very seriously. 

While errors are low, McKesson’s goal is zero errors.  To improve overall data management and minimize risk, McKesson chose SAP Data Maintenance for ERP by Vistex for several reasons:  its integration to SAP and its ability to manage data from non-SAP systems, as well as built-in scale.  Already experiencing lower IT costs, according to Arnold Wiechers, Director of Enterprise Data Management, “ [SAP Data Maintenance  for ERP by Vistex will] allow us in the future to … manage our master data as an asset, and not only see it as something we need to keep our systems up and running. 

We really can start expanding our data-- manage the data-- and actually drive value out of the data that we collect in our system.” McKesson expects within 2 years to be able to shift 1/3 more resources away from data entry to data management, further reducing costs.  Zero errors is a challenging goal, but to McKesson that means patients can focus on getting better, feeling confident that they are receiving the best care possible.