Less Waiting; More Wagging: How Olympic Veterinary Cardiology is Seeing More Pets Sooner, with NetSuite

Outgrowing the Old Way of Getting Around

Before NetSuite, Olympic Veterinary Cardiology’s mobile team planned their own routes by hand. Each afternoon, the team spent approximately 45 minutes or more mapping out the next day’s stops in Google Maps. It worked, but it wasn’t consistent, and it wasn’t always the fastest way to get the team on the road.

Scheduling and notifications lived in a different set of tools entirely. Financials were handled in Quickbooks, appointments were booked in Square Appointments, updates went out through a separate messaging platform, medical records sat in a fourth system and none of it talked to each other.

That question led the team to NetSuite’s Field Service Management module, and eventually to Plative.

“We started with NetSuite to replace QuickBooks, but a few months in, we realized NetSuite could do a lot more than accounting. We started asking what else we could bring into that one ecosystem.”

– Mike Maran, CFO

Building a System That Fits the Way They Work

Most companies using Field Service Management (FSM) are in industries like HVAC, where one task usually means one job. Olympic Veterinary Cardiology’s mobile visits don’t work that way. A single stop might include three, five, or more patients, and the team needed a way to track that without forcing every patient into their own separate task.

“Plative wasn’t distracted by the fact that we’re a veterinary practice, they jumped straight to solving the real problem: get our team from point A to point B to point C in the most efficient way possible.”

– Mike Maran, CFO

Plative also worked around another quirk of the business: pet owners drop patients off at each clinic by 8 a.m., but the mobile team’s actual arrival can fall anywhere between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. depending on the day’s route. 

That’s where Route Optimization, Plative’s own routing solution built for NetSuite, takes over. In under 5 minutes, it takes all of the scheduled clinic stops and automatically builds the most efficient route from point A to point B to point C and so on, factoring in traffic and drive time so the team’s day runs as smoothly as possible.

“It made a loop. There was no backtracking. When I checked it against what the team would have done manually, our route would have added an hour of drive time. What the system chose saved an hour, and the team still saw all the same patients.”

– Mike Maran, CFO

The Payoff: More Time With Patients, Less Time in the Car

Since going live, Olympic Veterinary Cardiology has seen its mobile team return from the road about an hour earlier on average, even with the same number of stops and the same Seattle traffic. 

The bigger shift has been getting to patients sooner in the day rather than later. 

“Route Optimization shares the same goal we have at the executive level. It’s not looking to go the farthest first. It’s looking at how soon we can actually get to a patient. That lines up with what we’re trying to do.”

– Mike Maran, CFO

That efficiency has also paid off beyond the road by eliminating a few disconnected systems. All financials, scheduling, and routing now live in NetSuite, and routing runs automatically instead of by hand. Olympic Veterinary Cardiology is also currently working with the NetSuite team on automatic notifications that let partner clinics know where they fall in the day’s route and when the team is on the way, which will retire yet another standalone tool.

What’s Next

With a fourth doctor joining the practice in December, Olympic Veterinary Cardiology is focused on standardizing how each mobile visit runs, regardless of which doctor or support staff is on site that day. The data coming out of NetSuite is already helping the team spot where visits run long or short and use that to guide training. As Maran put it, the goal is for a new doctor’s ramp-up to be as close to plug and play as possible, so growth doesn’t come at the cost of consistency.