ADF Medical and Dental Supply Chain

Serco provides medical and dental logistic services to the Australian Defence Force (ADF). This involves ensuring the Defence units receive the necessary medical and dental supplies within a required time period. This often calls for critically short response times as in the case of responding to the Bali bombing and the Asian Tsunami.

We are responsible for running the supply chain process from order entry through to distribution. In addition to this core service we manage and operate the loan of centrally held equipment to Defence units, carry out repair and preventative maintenance on medical and dental equipment, and assemble and supply medical kits.

The Medical and Dental contract’s headquarters is located in the Randwick Army barracks in Sydney, NSW. From this location we support all major ADF hospitals, larger area health facilities, Royal Australian Navy ships and approximately 450 other customers. We also extend our support to international ADF military operations.

Our contract activities include:

• Administration of approximately 123,000 requests per annum
• Management and warehousing of 100,000 picks per annum of pharmaceutical, surgical, medical and dental consumables and equipment
• National and international distribution of medical and dental items
• Repair, preventative maintenance and inspection of 24,000 medical and dental equipment items held as stock or issued to customers
• Assembly, supply and loan management of medical kits

Innovation

We have been able to provide innovative solutions to our client, which have been instrumental in our capacity to respond to emergency situations in a timely manner. They include:

• Implementing a software system to provide a consolidated and centralised national database and information system for repair and preventative maintenance
• Implementing the use of the advanced packaging material “Cool Cube” in order to enhance the reliability of the domestic and international Cold Chain process
• Establishing a single point of contact for our customer and end users by setting up a customer service centre
• Developing a database for the management of equipment currently on loan
• Establishing a national repair and preventative maintenance programme to replace previous regionally managed system.