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OnSight Optical
City, State: Clearwater, Fla.
Description: Optical management company. Manages over 40 dispensaries in ophthalmology practices in 9 Eastern states.
Key Executive: Mike Shane, founder and chief executive officer
Year Founded: 1995

CLEARWATER, Fla.--OnSight Optical provides its customers with what its founder and chief executive officer Mike Shane calls a “holistic” service.

“We’re a complete management company,” he explained. “We supply dispensaries with their frame inventory as well as their lenses, which we process in our full-service lab in Florida.”

Views of the waiting room and dispensing areas of Eye Designs, a dispensary managed by OnSight Optical located in the office of Eye Physicians in Voorhees, N.J. The office is owned by Jack Dugan, MD.

In order to stay connected to its customers at all times, OnSight provides them with a Delta computer system from Officemate. Customers use the system to send job orders to OnSight lab or to replenish inventory through either a modem or VPN (virtual private network).

“We’re on a real time basis,” said Shane. “The way I set it up, the samples in their offices are static. They have a planogram for frames. We try to pick the best sellers in the U.S.”

According to Shane, OnSight was the first company to integrate Delta system with Essilor’s Optifacts lab management system. OnSight’s customers put their orders into system, which generates an arrival notice, an invoice number and a tray number, which is transferred over to Optifacts. 

“We can get the Delta and Optifacts data totally mapped over. The order is not touched by human hands,” Shane noted. “Our point of sale system captures the data and integrates it into the lab program. It’s a complete system that starts at dispensary and goes all the way thru to mail-out in the lab.”

The system allows OnSight to fax a status sheet to the retail location each morning indicating where every job is in the lab. Customers can check at any time to see what station a job is at. “They get instant gratification because they don’t have to pick up the phone,” said Shane.

The system uses a private phone network that pushes jobs through a dial-up modem or VPN every half hour or allows OnSight to pull data in. “If the customer has a rush job, we can dial into their server using the modem and pull the job through,” Shane said.

OnSight also interfaces tracers with the point of sale system. Although some tracing systems send data only to the lab, not to the point of sale, the Delta systems lets OnSight’s customers trace a frame or lens and send the image and other data such as demographics, insurance information, frame size and shape, to the point of sale system as well as to OnSight.

“That’s great because it allows us to do a remake or a prescription change a year from now, if necessary,” Shane said.

--Andrew Karp