Business Sector
Academia/Medical Research
Organisation
The Francis Crick Institute
About
The Francis Crick Institute
Named after one of the UK’s greatest scientists, who co-discovered the structure of DNA, the Francis Crick Institute was founded as a joint project back in 2007 and has, until September this year, been based at a number of sites in and around London. The institute is a unique partnership of six of the UK’s most successful scientific and academic organisations – the Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK, the Wellcome Trust, University College London, Imperial College London and King’s College London. Fifteen hundred people work at the institute, 1,250 of them scientists.
Residing in a state-of-the-art building located in Brill Place, between St Pancras Station and the British Library in the Borough of Camden. It is one of the largest biomedical research laboratory under one roof in Europe and discoveries made here will speed up the development of treatments for major diseases such as cancer, heart disease and stroke.
Over 300 items a day make their way through the Francis Crick Logistics loading bay. Multiple deliveries with and manual purchase order look ups with manual Goods Receipting was one of the main issues faced by the Crick. The Fact that a many items could not be Goods Receipted automatically in the Purchasing system (Workday) meant that critical suppliers to the Crick were not paid in a timely manner.
Intandem Solution were appointed to provide an automated input and Goods Receipting solution that integrated directly with Workday. Intandem provide their MailTrack Solution to manage this effectively.
MailTrack was provided out of the box with many of the features required to manage the inbound and outbound functionality present and ready to go.
Intandem set up an automated feed from the Restore Delivery manifest and ingested this into the MailTrack system which gave immediate visual clarification of what was expected in at each delivery.
Secondly all open Workday purchase orders along with the item lines and description and quantities were also ingested into MailTrack. This enables ad hoc deliveries from other supplier outside of Restore to be made visible in Mail Track removing the need for rekeying in details.
Thirdly upon receipt of item arriving in the Logistics Loading Bay Items were scanned using the MailTrack Mobile Application and validated. This process then allowed bulk deliveries to be automatically goods receipted with a scheduled job running every hour to do this
Flexibility – with Intandem as your partner you can be sure we will listen to what you want, then deliver it.
Multiple Products - Intandem have a suite of products. That fit almost any business unit. MailTrack and Trace, Records and Archiving,
Control – Intandems Software Suite put you in control of your compliance, highly configurable software that lets you meet security and data protection requirements as well as allowing you to grow and enhance service offering.
Value Add – we give excellent value for money, timely communications that are tailored to your needs, professional and experienced staff at every level –our clients will tell you that working with Intandem is one of the best decision you’ll make
Some of the main benefits from the implementation were:
Reduced data entry by over 80%
Eliminated the errors in manually adding Purchase orders to the system as a live feed of open orders was implemented meaning look ups in real time.
Increased efficiency in the goods receipt process by reducing the number of times an item was scanned to just once.
Allowed multiple options for delivering to end user by allowing bulk basket deliveries to single locations for stock management, as well as flagging items that were damaged or where the recipient was not available to sign. The flagging process has led to a large reduction in missing items.
Automated emails were also introduced and sent to the end recipient if items could not be Goods receipted automatically due to high purchase value or if they were specific cold chain items.
“Intandem impressed us with their solutions, their track record and their people. They offered a great solution backed up with high security that gave us confidence from our first discussions with them.
They had a dedicated implementation team and worked with our delivery team to quickly understand our needs and issues and presented quick solutions to big problems for us.
“Intandems’ Team, from account manager to developers and support staff were willing to take on any challenge and solve it. We had a very tight non-moveable deadline to decommission our existing system, Intandem delivered with over 6 weeks to spare, and we could breathe easily again.
“But the biggest improvement to our working day came from automating our systems. In Sept 2022, we installed MailTrack with a number of configurations to suit us which gave us immediate improvements.
End-to-end inventory with fully auditable trail, including the ability to add photos of any damaged packages. Removing risk and helped us regain control of ad hoc deliveries.
Integration with Workday enabling all valid Purchase Orders to be visible in the system. This removed manual input errors and also sped up the supplier payment process, significantly important for us in good supplier relationships.