Anzacare - Serial Number Tracking, Returns and a Support Voice Agent for a Medical Device Maker

Client Overview

Anzacare Limited is a medical device manufacturer in Waikanae, north of Wellington. It makes the Dri-Sleeper range of bedwetting alarms: the Eclipse, a wireless alarm where a small Urosensor talks to a base unit in the room, and the Excel, a wired alarm with a sensor on a lead. An Eclipse Plus ships with two alarm bases, one for the child's room and one for the parents'. Anzacare also makes HEMOdialert, a device that detects venous needle dislodgement during haemodialysis.

Most Dri-Sleeper customers are overseas. Alarms sell through Shopify storefronts, Amazon marketplaces in several countries and eBay Australia, with UK orders fulfilled by James & James. Distributors take stock in bulk, shipped direct from Anzacare.

The Challenge

As a device maker, Anzacare needs to know which serial number went to which customer, so a unit can be traced if it comes back or if a part ever has to be followed up. That record lived in spreadsheets. Daily and distributor orders sat in one large workbook going back to 2013, and faulty-product returns were logged in a separate register that fed a management report on faulty product.

Orders arrived from many channels, each describing payment, status and dates in its own way. Serial numbers are not contiguous either: they are assigned when manufacture starts, and units that fail a bench test come back to the line later, so a range can never be assumed complete. Linking a returned unit back to the order it went out on meant searching by hand.

On the customer side, parents ring with an alarm that will not go off, goes off when dry, or a child who sleeps through it. Those calls need patient, step-by-step help, often from overseas and not always in English.

The Serial Number Portal

The core of the work is a React web app on AWS (Cognito sign-in, API Gateway, Lambda and DynamoDB in the Sydney region) that is now Anzacare's system of record for serial numbers. Orders sync in from Shopify, Amazon and eBay every few minutes. When James & James despatch an order, their webhook sends the serials they scanned, and the portal creates or updates each serial and links it to the order. If that update collides with another change to the same serial, the webhook fails on purpose so James & James send it again, rather than a shipped unit being left showing as in stock.

The portal understands Anzacare's real serial format: a letter for the label, the production day and year, then a sequence number. It knows that a base carries a prefixed carton label and an unprefixed battery-clip label, that a prefix gives the product family but not whether an Eclipse is a Plus, and that an Excel Special is one base with a second sensor rather than two bases. Serials can be scanned with a barcode wedge scanner, added one at a time, or bulk imported from CSV or Excel, including fixing the leading zero Excel drops from early-year serials. Amazon Transparency codes can be mapped to serials too.

Records older than 90 days in a finished state move to archive tables each week to keep the working screens fast, but lookups still search the archive, which matters because a returned unit's order is nearly always older than that.

Returns and Bench Testing

Returns replaced the spreadsheet register. Staff scan the returned unit, and the portal finds the order it went out on, even when the link is only recorded on the order rather than on the serial. Each unit gets a bench-test record of nineteen results, where every result can be pass, fail or not tested, because the faulty-product report depends on that difference. An Eclipse Plus is logged as one return with two bases, each tested and released on its own result.

A unit that tests good can be released back into stock, and it is permanently marked as previously returned. Every path that puts serials on an order, whether a screen, the scanner or an allocation, asks for confirmation before using one. The portal also catches common mis-scans, such as the retail barcode on the box or two labels scanned into one field, and offers to log the pair as an Eclipse Plus. Reference lists for failure modes, causes and disposals are edited in Settings and can be retired but never deleted, so older returns still read correctly.

The historical returns register was imported, so past returns sit alongside new ones in the returns reports.

Serial Alerts

When Anzacare changed a part in manufacturing, anyone handling an affected unit needed to know. Staff can now flag a single serial, flag serials during an import, or set a standing rule by production day and year that covers every matching unit, including archived units and units the portal has never held. The alert shows wherever that serial is looked up, most importantly at returns intake. Rules and alerts are retired rather than deleted, so the record of who flagged a unit and who cleared it stays.

Distributor Orders

Distributor consignments used to be recorded as serial ranges in the orders workbook, so those units never showed as sold and a return from a distributor could not be traced. Distributor orders now live in the portal. Staff enter ranges or paste serials per line, the portal expands them and shows every serial that is missing, already on another order, the wrong product or flagged, and the operator decides what to do with each. Allocation runs in small all-or-nothing chunks so a failure part way through cannot leave serials stranded, and a serials spreadsheet can be downloaded for each order.

Reports, Paperwork and Scheduled Emails

• Sales reports by day, week, month or custom range, with channel names normalised so the same marketplace is not counted under two names.
• A Canada tax report, plus EU and UK VAT reports exported as transaction-level CSVs for the accountant, with VAT worked back from the VAT-inclusive totals using an editable rate table, and refunds included.
• Stock forecasting showing units sold by product, country and channel, monthly and as a rolling three months, to help decide what stock to send to James & James.
• Returns reports with New Zealand dates, so a return lands in the right month of the management report.
• Shipping invoices generated as PDFs, with country-specific currency and tax settings.
• A daily sales email at 5pm New Zealand time. It counts an order when it is paid rather than when it ships, holds back Amazon orders until Amazon confirms them, and picks up late confirmations on the next run without counting anything twice.
• A Friday missing-serials email listing despatched orders with no serial recorded, leaving out stock fulfilled by Amazon and products that carry no serial label. It is sent even when the list is empty, so a quiet week reads as checked.

A Support Voice Agent for Dri-Sleeper

Dri-Sleeper's support line is answered by a voice agent built on Retell. It works through the same troubleshooting the team would: splitting "completely silent" from "does not go off when wet", walking a parent through the metal or warm-water sensor test, re-pairing an Eclipse sensor to its base before calling anything faulty, and knowing the Excel has no on/off switch and stays silent until it detects moisture. It also covers sensor placement, deep sleepers, relapses and how long the programme takes.

Because most customers are overseas, the agent answers in whatever language the caller speaks, and the team still reads the summary in English. It takes the caller's name, order number and email on every call. It has firm limits: it never promises a replacement, it passes insurance and paperwork requests to the team by email instead of answering them, and if a caller asks whether they are talking to a person it answers honestly and offers a follow-up from the team.

After each call, an AWS Lambda emails the Dri-Sleeper team the caller's details, the issue category and product model, whether it was resolved, an AI summary, the full transcript and the recording. Calls that need a follow-up are flagged in the subject line. The agent's wording, turn-taking and rules have been tuned from the team's notes on real calls.

The HEMOdialert Website

We moved the HEMOdialert product site onto AWS Amplify and prerendered the home page so search engines see the full content. We also fixed SEO, tracking and accessibility issues, set up real 404 responses for unknown pages, added phone and email click tracking, and sent the Request Information form through an AWS form backend.

Klaviyo List Clean-Up

Results

• Serial numbers, orders, returns and distributor consignments now sit in one portal instead of separate spreadsheets.
• A returned unit can be traced to the order it went out on, including orders that have been archived.
• Every returned unit has a bench-test record, and a unit only goes back into stock through a release that checks its test result.
• Units affected by a manufacturing part change are flagged to whoever handles them.
• The accountant receives VAT and tax workings from the portal, and the team gets daily sales and a weekly missing-serial check by email.
• Every support call reaches the team in writing, with a recording and a clear flag when it needs a follow-up.

Conclusion

Anzacare's work started with serial tracking and grew from there, one problem at a time, into returns, distributor orders, reporting and phone support. Each piece is built around how Anzacare actually makes and ships its alarms, from the way labels are printed to how each sales channel reports a paid order, so the records hold up when a unit comes back.