Optimising Global Supply Chain Operations to Meet Growing European Demand
In the global medical device market, product precision, regulatory compliance, and supply chain responsiveness help companies carve out a competitive advantage. GA Health takes these three requirements to heart, with the company’s innovative products used in millions of endoscopy procedures and designed for compatibility with the world’s top three endoscope brands: Olympus, Fujifilm, and Pentax.
The medical device manufacturer’s flagship brand, Andorate®, is recognised in the healthcare industry for its engineered endoscopy solutions, including endoscope control valves and tubing systems. As demand for Andorate’s products surged across European hospitals and healthcare providers, GA Health scaled up distribution to meet the growing needs of the global endoscopy market.
GA Health Founder and CEO Cindy Ye details the company’s operational transformation and how Epicor Kinetic helps to provide the foundation for smart manufacturing and critical distribution scalability in a rapidly changing market.
Every component within the Andorate product line plays a critical role in gastrointestinal procedures, demanding higher precision and stricter standards than industry norms. This precision ensures product relability and safety, earning strong trust from healthcare professionals—and spurring GA Health’s business expansion.
GA Health initially established the company’s core distribution base in Europe to serve markets in more than 15 countries, but then the business footprint expanded to the U.S., Australia, Singapore, and Malaysia. Previously, products were shipped directly from GA Health’s manufacturing base in China, with delivery times ranging from six to eight weeks. However, after setting up warehouses and distribution networks in Europe, customers expected to receive goods within two weeks, placing new demands on the company’s supply chain.
The shift highlighted challenges with back orders, with GA Health lacking inventory to fulfill all incoming product requests. Faced with hundreds of active SKUs and a growing volume of orders, Ye realized the root of the problem wasn’t just business growth, but with the company’s ERP system—unable to support accurate manufacturing planning and sales forecasting.
In addition, updates to the European Medical Device Regulation (MDR) required manufacturers to provide detailed English documentation, including manufacturing information, material sourcing, and testing reports. GA Health’s ERP system, while suitable for the domestic market, struggled to support multilingual documentation required for international auditing and regulatory compliance. Therefore, Ye set out to find a more sophisticated, global ERP platform capable of meeting fast delivery demands tied to the company’s new operational model.
During the search for a new ERP platform, Ye was focused on a solution that could support progressive manufacturing and high-level automation development. While conducting market research on global supply chain management, Ye discovered Epicor.
“When researching how to choose the right ERP platform, I discovered Epicor’s strengths,” shared Ye. “There aren’t many ERP systems on the market that can meet our future needs.”
In our European distribution operations, stockouts and missed orders were once quite common, resulting in an on-time, in-full (OTIF) rate of 20 to 30%. Today, with Epicor Kinetic, we can improve our OTIF rate to 98%.
To reduce risks tied to transformation and ensure rollout success, GA Health took a phased approach to implementation. The company began with the independent distribution division, first rolling out Epicor Kinetic in the Hong Kong and Ireland offices, and then expanding to manufacturing facilities in mainland China.
GA Health also took a user-centric approach to the ERP deployment, encouraging employees to actively participate in the customisation process. This hands-on involvement enhanced the solution’s usability and drove adoption, paving the way for a smooth deployment.
Ye believes the selection of Epicor Kinetic is not just a major technical upgrade, but also a positive cultural shift and smart, long-term infrastructure investment.
With Epicor Kinetic in place for nearly three years, GA Health has recognised significant operational benefits, transforming the company’s supply chain management. Ye shares details on the impressive results. “In our European distribution operations, stockouts and missed orders were once quite common, resulting in an on-time, in-full (OTIF) rate of 20 to 30%. Today, with Epicor Kinetic, we can improve our OTIF rate to 98%”.
Ye adds that the company is most excited about the ability to integrate distribution and production in real time. The integration within Epicor Kinetic helps to ensure seamless coordination across the entire supply chain, enabling GA Health to serve customers more quickly and reliably.
We chose Epicor Kinetic because the platform can scale with us and proactively provide the capabilities we need for the future.
Epicor Kinetic has also improved internal information sharing and communication at GA Health, allowing sales, marketing, and supply chain teams to collaborate on a single platform. This increased efficiency translates into a competitive advantage, enabling GA Health to meet its two-week delivery commitment in the European market—a standout achievement among industry peers.
GA Health’s goal is to achieve a higher level of intelligent operations, understanding that accurate forecasting is key to meeting customer demand. The company plans to deploy Epicor Inventory Planning & Optimization (Epicor IP&O) to better anticipate sales opportunities and control inventory and shipping costs. “In our industry, if we run out of stock, we could lose months or even years of customer orders,” Ye shares.
In the long term, GA Health plans to fully automate order processing, tapping into AI to automatically convert customer orders into production instructions and seamlessly transmit to the manufacturing plant. This is another key reason Ye decided to partner with Epicor. “We chose Epicor Kinetic because the platform can scale with us and proactively provide the capabilities we need for the future.”
Faced with supply chain pressures, regulatory challenges, and operational hurdles brought on by business expansion, GA Health made a forward-looking, strategic investment in Epicor Kinetic. With the intelligent ERP platform in place, the company solved immediate supply chain bottlenecks, elevated fulfillment capabilities to the highest level in the industry, and has a partner committed to continuous innovation to best support smart manufacturing. As a result, GA Health has future-proofed manufacturing and distribution operations to efficiently meet globalisation and expansion requirements.
