EMS Care Ambulance has served Columbus, GA and the surrounding areas for 11 years. Owner and Executive Director Alla Mezayek grew the company from a basic medical transport service to a fully fledged emergency response ambulance service.

Director of Operations Tanya Hardy believes that the company’s success is largely due to Mezayek’s vision. "She’s very involved in the company. She believes in treating her employees and her patients as family. I think that’s what made her successful."

This family atmosphere has continued even though the company’s services have expanded to include everything from critical care to doctor’s appointments. Many patients have become part of this family. "All of our dialysis patients are recurring", explains Hardy, "We transport them three times a week, every week. They’re pretty much like family to us now. Some of them will even ask us to stop to get some food!"

Running the day-to-day operations of this ambulance is no easy task. "It’s pretty hectic. I have 85 people underneath me currently. So that’s 85 personalities, 85 problems. We run the 16 trucks every day so I have mechanical issues that are constantly coming up. It’s always hectic - but it’s a good hectic!" Hardy says.

One of the main challenges for EMS Care Ambulance has been managing and tracking their supplies. "We seemed to be going through so much, we couldn’t track what truck it was going out on or who had taken what."

Tanya Hardy
Director of Operations

"Supplies were disappearing but they weren’t being accounted for in the call volume. So we needed to find a way to be able to track which truck had which supplies and then when the trucks came back in – what was missing from those supplies that originally went out."

The company tried dozens of inventory solutions but nothing seemed to be a good fit. "I think maybe within 30 minutes of starting we’d think No…this isn’t going to work," Hardy recalls "Then we found CyberStockroom and haven’t looked back since. It meets every single need we have."

Kim Harrelson, the company’s NICU supervisor and supplies inventory manager explains how she uses the inventory map to track supplies "I’ve got CyberStockroom set up so that supplies are loaded on the truck and when they use that specific item and they bring back the truck, I will take it out so that it’s accounted for."

She points out that this is a significant improvement over the previous method. "I was doing it by hand. I had lists made up with 17 locations (we have 17 bins on each truck). You end up with a stack of papers and you can’t remember which stack is accurate."

But it wasn’t just about being disorganized, the company was losing supplies and money:

"Before, we did everything on paper and we had no way to even track what we were losing, where it was going, how much we were losing each month or quarterly or yearly, we just knew it was going out the door. With CyberStockroom we have a starting ground to see how much we’re losing, where we’re losing it, and to be able to control it moving forward to cut those costs back."

Harrelson agrees that the inventory map is the key to prevent loss "Being able to create different locations and being able to create each individual truck was pretty neat. That way we can keep up with everything that is assigned to that truck. If they come back saying they don’t have something on that truck we can say ‘well on this date it’s assigned to the truck so what happened between this date and now if you don’t have that item?’"

Another reason EMS Care Ambulance decided to implement CyberStockroom was the expiry date feature. "Keeping up with the expiration dates is a big concern for us," Hardy explains "We need to be able to tell when our stuff is going to expire on each truck. Expired medical equipment is a bad thing. We don’t ever want to have that. A lot of the other programs we looked at didn’t have that option."

On top of being feature-rich Hardy says that "CyberStockroom is very user friendly, easy to explain." Harrelson agrees "CyberStockroom was pretty much self-explanatory."

EMS Care Ambulance joins a number of EMS, Fire, and Police departments across North America who have implemented inventory mapping with CyberStockroom. In these dynamic organizations where supplies, tools, and equipment are constantly moving between people and locations, it’s absolutely critical to maintain inventory visibility in order to operate effectively and minimize the wasting of these necessary resources.