How SomnoMed cut label creation time 78% with one NetSuite integration

SomnoMed Group is the world's largest supplier of oral sleep apnea devices, and operates in 28 countries. Headquartered in Sydney, Australia, the company develops and manufactures custom-fitted mandibular advancement devices, prescribed by dentists to treat obstructive sleep apnea. Each device is custom-made to a patient's dental impressions, produced at a central manufacturing facility in Manila, and then shipped to distribution hubs across Europe. From there, local teams prepare outbound shipments to dentists and dental practices across France, Germany, the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, and beyond.

With multiple carriers operating in each country and a high volume of daily shipments, managing the outbound logistics from these hubs was labour-intensive. Here's how they solved it with Cargoson's multi-carrier transport management software.

Emmanuelle Morice, Customer Experience and Operations Director Europe, oversaw the rollout of Cargoson across the European operation, starting with the France hub.

Before Cargoson, each hub managed shipments by logging into individual carrier portals and creating labels manually. In countries with two or three carriers, that meant repeating the same process across multiple systems for every single order.

"Some countries have one, two, or even three carriers. We'd go to each carrier's interface and create the label individually. If there were several packages for the same client, we had to manually work out the weight and references for each one. It was time-consuming," explains Emmanuelle.

There was also a recurring error: many of SomnoMed's dentist clients practice across multiple sites. When staff created labels manually, they sometimes selected the wrong delivery address. The package would leave the hub headed to the wrong location entirely.

SomnoMed uses NetSuite as its ERP. The goal was to find a way to connect their various European carriers to NetSuite without building a separate integration for each one. SomnoMed's logistics IT team found Cargoson as the solution. 

The integration started with France, the first country to go live with a full NetSuite connection. Once the shipping step is completed in NetSuite, labels can be generated in bulk and printed in sequence, ordered by sales order number, which matches how invoices are printed and makes reconciliation straightforward. Cargoson built this custom sorting feature specifically for SomnoMed's workflow.

The impact on the French office was immediate and measurable.

That's a 78% reduction in time spent on daily label creation.

 

The wrong-address errors also disappeared entirely. Because shipments are now generated directly from the order in NetSuite, where the client selected their delivery site at the time of purchase, the address is pulled automatically. There is no manual selection, so there is no possibility for that type of mistake.

Rolling out Cargoson across multiple European hubs took time. Like most transport management software rollouts, adoption got some pushback at first. Teams were given proper training and reference materials, and the feedback turned positive once the system was in place.

Offices that initially pushed back consistently came back with positive feedback once the system was in place.

Beyond the day-to-day efficiency gains, Cargoson opened up a reporting capability that SomnoMed had not had before. The company now uses carrier data from Cargoson as one of two timestamps to measure how long each hub takes to process and dispatch an outbound shipment. That measurement runs from the moment a package arrives from Manila to the moment the carrier picks it up.

"Before, we were completely in the dark. In other regions, measuring this KPI is straightforward because there's only one carrier. In Europe, with different carriers across different countries, we had no data at all. Now we do," Emmanuelle notes.

The data allows management to spot anomalies. If a hub is taking ten days to dispatch what should take two, that is now visible. It also helps justify staffing decisions. Management can now see whether operations are running efficiently and whether more or fewer people are needed to handle logistics.

The Cargoson team's responsiveness was something Emmanuelle highlighted specifically. With offices in multiple countries going live at different times, the ability to arrange training sessions on short notice made a practical difference.
 
"What I really appreciated about the Cargoson team is that they made themselves available whenever we needed training for the setup. They didn't just leave us to figure it out on our own. Even the IT team: there were always small questions and small setup issues at the start, and they always responded quickly. That's really helpful," Emmanuelle adds.
 

Today, SomnoMed's European hubs manage all outbound shipments through one platform connected to NetSuite. What used to take 90 minutes of manual label creation in France now takes 20. Address errors from manual entry are gone. Management has visibility into dispatch times across every hub for the first time. And the teams that initially pushed back on the switch now refuse to go back. For a medical device company shipping custom products to dentists across Europe through multiple carriers in every country, that's exactly what they needed.


SomnoMed is one of 500+ companies managing multi-carrier freight through Cargoson. Want to see how it works with your carriers and ERP?

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