EndoChoice Leverages Ecommerce to Disrupt the Gastrointestinal Supplies Market

Posted by Ranga Bodla, Director of Industry Marketing, Manufacturing & Wholesale Distribution

Gastrointestinal disruption…now that doesn’t sound good. For EndoChoice, a company manufacturing gastrointestinal (GI) devices, diagnostics, infection control and imaging for GI specialists, it’s fantastic.

In this case, the disruption has occurred across the entire GI products market as EndoChoice leveraged the cloud to become the fastest-growing medical technology company in the U.S., with compound year-over-year growth of more than 100 percent since its founding in 2008.

For EndoChoice, NetSuite is a foundational technology platform that’s provided the agility to grow the business globally. EndoChoice uses NetSuite across the business, but two critical areas provide competitive differentiation and advantage.

For one, the Alpharetta, Ga.-based company uses NetSuite’s manufacturing capabilities to assemble EndoChoice-branded kits that contain essential products for a variety of GI procedures. The customized kits are highly appealing to GI centers, as they don’t need to source multiple products from multiple suppliers and are essential for infection control compliance within the GI suite. EndoChoice does the legwork for its customers, using NetSuite to automate transactions with a variety of suppliers. Additionally, by letting the GI caregiver select the specific content of the kit, EndoChoice provides additional value.

Next, EndoChoice takes advantage of NetSuite’s SuiteCommerce platform to offer its B2B medical customers a rich and interactive consumer-like ecommerce experience at www.endochoice.com. The website offers buyers a selection of informative videos as well as streamlined checkout, "quick list" reordering and easy management of shipping and billing information, orders, quotes, support and returns. With a password-protected B2B portal and support for orders in both U.S. dollars and foreign currencies, the EndoChoice site integrates seamlessly with NetSuite financials, inventory and order management to streamline end-to-end processes and gives the company 360-degree visibility of its customers. The B2B portal is offered in multiple languages to support EndoChoice’s global reach.

“The flexibility of NetSuite combined with availability for multiple country-specific accounting standards in the cloud have made our rapid expansion doable. Within three months of us acquiring and merging with three different organizations, we were able to get NetSuite up and running within all locations. This is unheard of in a traditional ERP environment," said EndoChoice VP of IT, Bjarke Ormstrup. "Being able to push the web sites in multiple languages with short notice was an additional benefit that we originally did not consider, but it became an easy win and has been well adopted."

With its innovative initiatives, EndoChoice is at the leading edge of the ongoing evolution of ecommerce in manufacturing and distribution. The business agility and cost-efficiencies that EndoChoice has achieved with NetSuite have helped power phenomenal growth. In just five years, the company’s workforce has grown from two people to nearly 400.

Its growth has not gone unnoticed. In the fall of 2013, EndoChoice received the Hire Power Award from Inc. Magazine, was selected as one of HealthCare’s Hottest Companies by Modern HealthCare Magazine and earned recognition from Excellence in Surgical Products for innovative visualization technology.