Success Stories - The CSSC Group, LLC

Manufacturer Gains Edge Over The Competition

A manufacturing company’s product was a machine that consisted of thousands of parts. No two machines were the same, so each machine had to be customized based upon the configuration and needs of the customer.

When a salesperson conducted a sales meeting with a potential customer, he/she would ask the customer what attributes the machine should contain, would return to the factory and would pass the details to Engineering. The engineers would then create a drawing of the machine’s “footprint” and spend almost two weeks detailing the parts and quantities of parts that would be required to build the machine. The engineering QA team would verify the design and bill of materials.

Then, Engineering would send the bill of materials to Manufacturing to get a sense of the labor required to assemble the machine. The Manufacturing team would spend a few days estimating the labor costs.

After Manufacturing determined its estimate of labor, Manufacturing would send the bill of materials created by Engineering, attach their labor estimates for assembly and send the documents to Accounting to cost-out the machine.

After approximately a week, Accounting determined the cost of the machine. Then, Sales would mark-up the price of the machine and inform the salesperson with the selling price of the machine. The salesperson, then, contacted the client with an estimated cost.

All of this effort from the time of the initial potential customer meeting to the communication of the estimated cost to the client took almost three weeks.

The CSSC Group was assigned to expedite the process. Upon completion of the coding and testing, an application was written that executed on the salesperson’s laptop. The CSSC Group met with the President and his executive staff to demonstrate the software on the wall projector in the Boardroom.

Prior to the demonstration, an employee of the sales department created a contrived configuration and played the role of the customer. The contrived configuration was sent to Engineering, Manufacturing, Accounting and Sales to determine the final sales price.

Then a salesperson, unfamiliar with the software application, spent about 10 minutes with a representative of CSSC to learn the application.

The “client” then came into the Boardroom, sat across from the salesperson and answered questions asked by the salesperson who completed various data entry fields on his laptop. After the needs of the client was entered, the salesperson depressed the “Process” button and within a minute, a sales quote was presented plus a bill of materials for Manufacturing.

The Director of Sales had the calculated cost in a sealed envelope. When the salesperson reported the quote generated by the software of $19,765.62, the Director of Sales opened the envelope and the amount calculated by Accounting was $19,765.87. The executive team was delighted because they were happy to come in within $1,000 of the estimate.

So, the salesperson was now able to quote accurate numbers to clients in minutes rather than in weeks, which gave them an edge over the competition.

Tanker Cleaning That Saved Lives

The tanker truck industry was very interesting.

We learned that those 7,000 gallon tanker trucks would carry pharmaceuticals on one run, get cleaned and be filled with home heating oil, get cleaned and carry orange juice, get cleaned and carry Coca-Cola syrup, and then later, after cleaning, carry baby formula!

Obviously, these tankers needed thorough cleaning after each delivery of the goods that they transported. The company that cleaned these tankers used about 400 gallons of a special cleaning fluid and then needed to be steamed and rinsed. At times, employees would have to climb into these tankers to hand-scrub the interior and to certify that it was sanitized properly.

The tanker cleaning companies take their responsibilities seriously and are very diligent with their procedures. All of the companies that have their fluids transported each inspect the tank cleaner facilities frequently as a safety and quality control measure.

The tanker company that contracted with CSSC used a machine that was pre-programmed for 8 different cleaning/sanitizing processes. Each process contained many steps and many actions. But the tank cleaning company only had the ability to clean/sanitize only 8 types of truck loads automatically; the remaining ones had to be cleaned/sanitized manually. Any manual process left human error to occur which could have caused illness or death of the consumer if not caught before packaging and the ultimate end-user consumption.

In fact, when a manual cleaning and sanitizing operations was needed, the insertion of employees to inspect, and sometimes finish the sanitizing, required special breathing gear. Unfortunately, every year there are workers who die inspecting these tankers. This further demanded that the cleaning and sanitizing become as automated as possible.

Fortunately, the company that manufactured the processor for the automated cleaning machine had a ninth switch and named it “Auto”.

The CSSC Group, in coordination with the manufacturer of the device, was able to create an unlimited number of cleaning types and cleaning cycles by having management define an unlimited number of cleaning/sanitizing product cycle types (OJ, OIL, MILK, etc.) cycles. Each cycle had an unlimited number of management-defined steps and injections of sanitizing fluids, water and steam, each with time and chemical infusions or water rinsing, etc. The CSSC software loaded the commands selected on the PC into the ‘ladders’ and ‘registers’ in the main processing device so that the automated cleaning machine thought that it was getting instructions from its own processor.

So, the cleaning workers would choose one of the 8 preset steps in the main controller, or select “auto” and define which cycle on the desktop computer to use when “Auto” was selected. In this way, “auto” could be an unlimited selection of cleaning cycles.

The true test of our work was when Coca-Cola came to inspect the facility. The physical plant got a 90 out of 120 but the CSSC cleaning software and the device that contained the original 8 selections received a 120 out of 120 !

Hospital System Serves At-Risk Patients

Prior to the introduction of the Patient Access Library (PAL), this psychiatric segment of a huge hospital system relied upon paper documents and limited computer tools such as Excel and Word to manage the triaging and admission of patients suffering from psychiatric issues and psychological issues.

Prior to the activation of the PAL system, the process of acquiring triage information was slow and management recognized that there was a need to better-serve this population of patients who needed psychiatric and psychological medical care.

After the PAL system was completed, patient services were not only fast but comprehensive.

When the patient called the psychiatric emergency hot line, after entering the caller’s name, the triage nurse would start to perform intake for presenting problems, precipitating factors, medical history, pharmaceutical history and other necessary information to assist the triage nurse with the decision for the correct course of action.

Concurrently with the acquisition of information, the system would have alerted the triage nurse with a pop-up dialog box, if the patient was known for homicidal or suicidal ideation. In that case, the triage nurse, while acquiring patient information, would be alerting the police or paramedics to go to the patient’s location to get the patient to safety – probably to the nearest PESS (Psychiatric Emergency Screening Service) facility – all while on the telephone taking the call. The system would have also located and alerted psychiatric/psychological professionals close to the zip code on file for the patient. The system also had the ability to scan the hospital bed boards for hospitals in the health care system to determine where an available bed existed.

The PAL system also maintained a consult history for the patients, kept track of their pharmaceuticals, insurance, continuum of care, admissions tracking and managed care. The PAL system performed many more “behind the scenes” activities, but the preceding activities described the major components.

In addition, the system contained an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for companies that subscribed for that service to assist employees when exposed to traumatic events (e.g. traumatized bank tellers after a bank robbery).

The key role of the software was the assurance of safety, the primary goal of the health care company, and quality services for their patients.

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