HealthNetAsia
Extends Supply-Chain Services to Asia's Health Care Community with Best-of-Breed Solutions

HealthNetAsia offers something to both sides of the sales equation," says Anne Hockett, Chief Executive Officer of HealthNetAsia. "By streamlining the way hospitals buy and manufacturers sell and fulfill using our best-of-breed solutions, we deliver real cost-savings to our customers."

Company

• HealthNetAsia Pte Limited

Industry/Market

• Health Care

Business Issue

• Inefficient, paper-based procurement practices by Asia's hospitals, labs, and clinics
• High-cost and low-quality warehousing and distribution services available to health care product manufacturers
• Limited access to product information and desire for improved customer care

Business Results

• Improved procurement and hospitals materials management
• Reduced supply-chain costs for health care product manufacturers
• A more direct, lower-cost sales channel between health care buyers and suppliers

Configuration

• Sun E220-R and E420R servers
• Ariba Marketplace
• Oracle 8i Database
• Chief Solution Architect and System Integrator Andersen

HealthNetAsia (HNA) is an online procurement and logistics service provider geared toward significantly lowering overall supply chain costs for Asia Pacific buyers (hospitals, group practices, and labs) and suppliers (medical product/ pharmaceutical manufacturers and key distributors). The company chose Sun's E220-R and E420R development and production servers based on Sun's proven performance as a platform for Ariba software, which in turn allowed HNA deliver its solution to the market through Andersen's fast track deployment service and overall project management.

The Health Care Market in Asia Pacific
The Asia Pacific medical supplies and pharmaceutical market is a US$ 93 billion business. Throughout the region, expenditure on medical supplies, consumables, product and pharmaceuticals is set to rise in line with Asia's growing demand for improved health care.

Hospitals, labs and clinics are deeply dependent on the availability and timely arrival of these products from their key suppliers in order to ensure the quality of patient care. For many buyers, the question is not so much what to buy, since most hospitals and group practices have been relying on a "trusted" range of medical products for many years, but how they buy, which is typically unplanned, de-centralized, and labor-intensive.

Health care product manufacturers are saddled with their own set of issues. Reliant to a large degree on local distributors, there is dissatisfaction with the quality of warehousing and distribution services and a shortage of reliable market research information to support strategic sales and marketing efforts.

About HealthNetAsia
HealthNetAsia was established to address the friction in the Asia Pacific health care supply chain with a more compelling and cost-effective means of conducting business by:

• Networking buyers through procurement process and information enticements
• Appealing to leading multinational pharmaceutical and medical products; manufacturers through state-of-the-art catalog management, logistics economies-of-scale, and customer data feedback;
• Generating key transaction data that can be leveraged to reduce logistics costs;

To achieve these goals, HNA needed a best-of-breed solution to support its online procurement and logistics services for the Asia Pacific medical supplies and pharmaceutical market. It identified the importance of partnering with the world's best technology, logistics and service provider organizations to ensure a high quality solution across the supply chain.

After careful consideration, HNA decided on Ariba's Marketplace solution for procurement and logistics software support. HNA then needed an open and robust IT platform so as to ensure quick market place response. It also needed the ability to scale as the number of transactions increased. The company chose Sun's E220-R and E420R development and production servers based on Sun's proven performance as a platform for Ariba software.

To put together the solution, Andersen, the global leader in professional services, was selected as the chief solution architect and systems integrator. This was based on their deep understanding of the fundamental supply-chain inefficiencies and their expertise in developing digital solutions to address such problems in Asia.

Andersen successfully implemented the solution which was divided into three phases: implementation of Ariba Marketplace; development of the HNA portal to ensure future scalability; and integration of the portal with Ariba Marketplace application.

How the Solution Provides Real Cost Benefits to Users
HNA applies Web-based technologies to streamline and lower the cost of warehousing, distribution, and customer care. The company facilitates, but does not intermediate price discussions between buyers and suppliers. In fact, the HNA model encourages direct Buyer-Supplier relations by providing product enquiry, sales, fulfillment and account management tools that shorten the sales cycle, lower administrative fees, and reduce overall operating costs.

Specifically, the HNA model provides additional and potentially dramatic direct cost savings by offering suppliers high-quality, lower-cost warehousing services, while at the same time encouraging more rational and analytical consolidated ordering by providing Buyers with the necessary Web-based order entry, purchasing methodologies and inventory management services to generate significant indirect and direct cost savings.

With planned operations in four Asian hubs (Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia), HNA will need to quickly adapt its platform and supporting infrastructure to meet the unique procurement and logistics needs of its customers.

Strong Partners = Rapid Solution Deployment
HNA has strategically managed a "quick-build" approach to designing and deploying its integrated procurement, customer care and logistics platform solution in both English and Japanese. Rather than hire large teams of in-house developers, HNA wraps its solution design, deployment and systems management with "best-in-class" service and technology providers. Its core strength is in assembling and managing these strategic partnerships in order to bring a fully-integrated web-based channel to the market quickly, cost effectively, and with limited project risk.

HNA was successfully built and rapidly deployed by its best-of-breed partners - Ariba, Sun and Andersen. It prides itself as being the first private e-marketplace in the Asia Pacific market catered to the health and pharmaceutical market.

HealthNetAsia offers something to both sides of the sales equation," says Anne Hockett, Chief Executive Officer of HealthNetAsia. "By streamlining the way hospitals buy and manufacturers sell and fulfill using our best-of-breed solutions, we deliver real cost-savings to our customers."

The May 2001 launch of the fully-integrated HNA service platform and the planned roll-out of pilot projects in Singapore and Japan are designed to clearly demonstrate the end-to-end order processing and fulfillment benefits now available to the Asia Pacific health care sector through HNA.

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