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Alcon’s contact lens trial collection blended in amongst the rest: rickety plastic drawers housing hundreds of contact lens boxes, confined and competing for space in the back storage closets of eye care clinics across the world.
The contact lens “fit set” convention calls for all possible prescriptions to be stored in pre-assigned slots, and to be kept on hand at all times—lending to costly inventory management and upkeep. Knowing there had to be a better way, Alcon approached Pushstart with a need to streamline their lens trial fit sets to mitigate product loss and drive efficiency for those that manage clinic inventory on the ground.
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Pushstart put rubber to the road—literally—conducting an in-depth discovery phase that focused on on-location field research, stakeholder interviews, secret-shopper experiences, and synthesis of user anecdotes, gaining a multi-faceted perspective for all user types.
A detailed journey mapping phase unearthed a slew of pain points: human error lent to lenses being misplaced or unknowingly expired. Hours of staff time spent cataloging, reorganizing, and dumping lenses into catch-all bins became an expected state of overwhelm.
Pushstart got to work generating product concepts that could empower Alcon in their future visioning strategy. Concepts addressed opportunities that would save time in finding and restocking lenses, mitigating product loss due to expiry, promote organization in that supports first-in-first-out practices, reap high-fidelity data that informs ordering and restocking habits and net loss at the local and global level, all while supporting Eye Care Professionals, Alcon Representatives, and clinic techs, and new hires alike.
Pushstart proposed a solution to bring Alcon's fully manual trial lens inventory systems to the connected era. Think: a rigid, one-size-must-fit-all dewey decimal system converted to a living, breathing, adaptable, customizable, and scalable database of trial lenses for eye care practices large and small.
Equipped with a digital lens database, doctors can search for lenses from a tablet during their patient’s exam, which in turn illuminates the respective drawer and slot for a supporting tech to pull lenses from. The database culls lenses in the background to prioritize and illuminate the earliest expiring lenses, and automatically re-orders lenses when inventory runs low. First-in-first-out practices are managed by the smart system, and not reliant on a purely human process, meaning less overhead time spent, and less waste overall.
Sensor-enabled smart drawers also support modular lens storage. During restocking, the system reads lens data and listens to where the user places the lens, re-assigning it to its home in realtime. By associating drawer slots to lens scan data, any lens can be stored anywhere the practice prefers.
Not only does the intelligent fit set do away with the old mindset of "a place for everything, with everything in its place," but it is now fit to serve the way each individual practice operates—down to the trials they order most vs. least of. This means the practice can effectively keep the lenses they need, not the ones they don't.
Now leading the charge with a solution ahead of the rest of the industry, Alcon's connected fit set becomes an automatic showroom piece in each clinic's lobby while other outdated manual fit sets are left to collect dust in the back storage closet. Alcon's newly integrated tech signals to customers that the brand is on the frontlines of a tech turning point, leaving a lasting impression and a leg up in brand recognition and loyalty.
