Customer success: How Marathon Medical pivoted its supply chain to help patients and frontline workers

Marathon Medical, founded in 2002 by John St. Leger, distributes medical supplies for the Veterans Health Administration, including 168 of its contiguous US medical centers. The VA serves more than 9 million veterans across 1,074 outpatient facilities and 170 medical centers.

Through the years, Marathon Medical’s business scope has broadened and recently, grown more critically significant. The U.S. government has tapped the company to help ship millions of syringes and needles to distribute the coronavirus vaccine.

When COVID-19 struck, the VA designated Marathon Medical and other suppliers as essential businesses, meaning that the medical distributor has not had to shut down operations during the ongoing implications of coronavirus.

Instead, the company has adjusted and scaled to the demand of distributing critical and potentially life-saving products.

Shifting and scaling critical supplies during a pandemic

As the coronavirus spread throughout the world, medical suppliers like Marathon Medical saw a sharp uptick in the need for their supply chains to service frontline healthcare workers.

The New England Journal of Medicine reported that U.S. hospitals signaled early on the shortages of key equipment that would help care for patients and frontline workers during the pandemic.

According to St. Leger, companies like Marathon Medical felt this exponential demand firsthand. For example, a surface disinfectant that used to take up just pallets before COVID was now required by the truckloads. This disinfectant was suddenly in high demand in medical facilities to slow the spread of viruses like COVID-19. Additionally, the company took on the critical distribution of 125 ventilators.

To scale with the demand of new or expanded product lines, it was vital that the company’s ERP provide its personnel with up-to-the-second accuracy in its inventory data. Marathon Medical works closely with large manufacturers, so it is imperative that they can align their system to the manufacturer’s system, and easily extrapolate data in a way the manufacturer can seamlessly use it.

To top it all off, the company needed to keep up daily business as well.

Sage 100cloud enabled them to do just that.

How Sage 100cloud helped leadership focus on strategic growth

“That’s the benefit with Sage. It’s seamless as you scale,” says St. Leger. “We don’t have to make any adjustments. We don’t have to add another module. It’s right there for us as we continue to increase and scale.”

As a Sage customer for more than 18 years, St. Leger says he cannot imagine running the company without Sage 100cloud.

And even more so lately, as his responsibilities are now more strategic with growing business relationships and partnerships. Sage allows St. Leger’s leadership team to run the business effectively, so he can focus on strategic growth.

With the company’s role in shipping tens of millions of syringes and needles to federal warehouses across the country in preparation for the mass distribution of the coronavirus vaccine, its work is more significant than ever.

“I don’t see a time where Sage will not be our primary solution for all of our needs,” St. Leger says. “It’s such a powerful program. It gives us room to grow and continues to tailor to our needs.”

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