Well-laid plans may be the key to business success, but sometimes chance encounters create the greatest opportunities. With 13 years of experience behind it, Meadville-based Wood Technologies appears to be benefiting from such serendipity in a 3-year-old partnership with Steris Corporation of Mentor, Ohio, and Censis Technologies of Franklin, Tenn., for whom Wood implements the Steris Censitrac Instrument Management Solutions Software. It’s a relationship that developed from a conversation Sheila Wood had with a fellow passenger–a Steris executive–on a flight from Erie.
That conversation ended up drawing Wood into the alliance between Steris and Censis and led to her small company’s role as the implementer of Censitrac, which provides hospitals with a system for managing and tracking trays of surgical instruments. Among other options, the system enables medical staff to know exactly where to locate the right surgical instrument in a sterile condition when it is needed to operate on a patient.
To deliver that service to hospitals, the partnership leverages Steris’ strength as an international provider of infection protection and contamination control to the healthcare industry; Censis’ system for surgical instrument tracking and management; and Wood Technologies’ background in assisting companies with the implementation of material and enterprise resource planning software.
To carry out its role, Wood created user-friendly conversion software called Dynasty, which can work independently as a surgical instrument management system or be integrated with other tracking software. That product has formed the basis for a new division of Wood Technologies, from which the company is marketing Dynasty as a tool for autoclave departments to verify sterilization information before importing surgical instruments into the Censitrac system. Now under development is a web-based implementation of Dynasty’s inventory management system.
After a little more than a year in the market, Wood has installed the Censis system in 50 hospitals, including Children’s and UPMC McGee hospitals in Pittsburgh, the Erie VA Medical Center, and Cleveland University Hospital, and it is on order from some 80 other hospitals, according to Wood. That full book of business appears to validate the company’s expansion into health care and the winning role it has found with its two partners.
“I started Wood Technologies as an owner with myself as the sole employee,” Wood says. “And we’ve managed to grow this company, providing full and part-time work for 12 employees, all of whom are technologically skilled, in a diversified company right here in Meadville.”
Source: Wood Technologies, Sheila Wood
Writer: Joseph Plummer
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