Ensuring hearing implant equipment gets to customers safe, fast and with a personal touch
During Better Hearing & Speech Month, we’re giving you a behind the scenes look at some important departments that are integral to the work we do at Cochlear Americas to service our customers and recipients every day. When you pick Cochlear to be your partner in hearing, every member of our team is committed to ensuring you “Hear Now. And Always”, from the moment you start your journey and throughout your life.
Did you know that we have an onsite warehouse and an entire team that manages the safe packaging, shipment and return of our customer’s hearing equipment throughout the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico?
This hardworking team of 25 makes up our Supply Chain department! This team picks and ships orders, receives returns, manages the purchasing of all hearing implant equipment parts, plans and forecasts with vendors and suppliers, and works on continued improvements in our supply chain to better serve our customers.
“More than 99 percent of all orders that print to our warehouse get shipped the same day to our customers,” said Nils Alstad, Senior Manager, Supply Chain. “I’m extremely proud of our staff. We have worked hard to transform ourselves into a customer-friendly supply chain to not only ensure we’re delivering the best service in terms of efficiency and accuracy, but to also make it a more personalized service for our recipients. We’re looking at everything from speed, accuracy, instructions and packaging.”
Fun facts about the department:
- Manages more than 200,000 customer orders every year.
- Around 1.3 million different pieces of hearing implant equipment are picked to be shipped every year.
- Directs the ordering of more than 2,000 parts from vendors and suppliers.
- Warehouse runs 12 hours a day to help our recipients not be without sound.
“I enjoy working for Cochlear because I know for certain that we help people every day. Every package, upgrade, or activation kit we ship today means that someone will hear tomorrow,” said Michael Ware, Order Fulfillment Specialist I. “No one will ever know our names or see our faces. But we, the Supply Chain team, are the ‘Now’ in the Cochlear promise of ‘Hear Now. And Always’.”
Learn more about Cochlear and how hearing implant devices may help you at www.cochlear.com/us.
