User Review
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ERP growth-At the end of March 2016, three distributors of health care products merged to form Concordance Healthcare Solutions.
Apart from their line of business, the three had little in common. Employee-owned Seneca Medical primarily supplied hospitals in the Midwest with acute care products. Kreisers, a family business, served hospitals, physicians and surgery centers in the upper Midwest, with the Veterans’ Administration (VA) accounting for much of its business. The third company, MMS, a partnership, operated further south, primarily in post-acute, long-term care supplies.
And, of course, their lifeblood ERP systems were built on different software. Seneca ran S2K from Vormittag Associates Inc. (VAI) on IBM’s Power architecture. Kreisers was also on Power, but running Software Alternatives’ ComEdge. MMS, a Windows shop, ran Epicor on top of Microsoft SQL Server.
As the merger date approached, the CIOs of the three businesses visited one another’s headquarters to evaluate and discuss this ERP issue. Ultimately, they decided to consolidate on Seneca’s VAI S2K platform. Seneca had 300 users on its ERP system, but VAI doesn’t charge per seat for licenses.
“It allowed us to economically add almost a thousand users and add 15 locations to the system,” says Keith Price, CIO of Seneca at the time of the merger and now CIO of Concordance.
