Big Winners, Entrepreneurial Spirit Award
From age 25, A. Ray Dalton was creating successful companies — seven in all, to be exact. For Dalton, being an entrepreneur isn’t just about pursuing the next big opportunity. Instead, he’s launched each successive business with same vision — to create opportunities for others, both by reducing the cost of healthcare and contributing to the local economy. As the founder, president and CEO of PartsSource Inc., Dalton has truly transformed this vision into a reality.
Long before his days as CEO of PartsSource, Dalton showed his enduring entrepreneurial spirit. After dropping out of high school and serving a stint in the Air Force, he enrolled in night classes to get his college degree. He went on to found a string of successful businesses in the health care field, and impressively, sold two of them to General Electric.
By the time he sold his company, OneSource Services, to GE in 2000, Dalton already had plans for his next big idea: a company that could provide high quality medical replacement parts to healthcare service professionals. Dalton understood that hospitals and other facilities required access to quality replacement parts on a daily basis. However, it was the technicians who performed repairs on the medical equipment who were often responsible for sourcing the replacement parts — eating up time that could be spent on servicing the medical equipment. Dalton realized that there was a clear industry need for a company that could provide the replacement parts quickly and affordably. And in 1999, he launched PartsSource.
From the beginning, PartsSource served a unique and important need for the health care industry. But even with its success, Dalton and his team have continued to look for new ways to ease the price burden on health care providers as their costs continue to rise. So in addition to handling more than 1,000 parts requests each day, the company has added proprietary software solutions to its lineup of services.
Designed to help customers manage costs and operations even more efficiently, PartsSource’s ePartsFinder solution has not only expanded the company’s value proposition but its impact on the health care industry. Representing the only Web-enabled parts procurement and lifecycle management application in the industry, the technology enables customers to access a number of features in order to better manage the process of part replacement. From enhanced budget management to instant management reporting, the benefits are many for today’s health care professionals. And today, more than 600 hospitals and 3,000 service professionals utilize ePartsFinder to acquire and manage their medical replacement parts.
By staying committed to innovation, Dalton has helped PartsSource better serve its existing customers, while gaining new business to grow the company. And under his leadership, this growth has been tremendous. PartsSource now provides jobs to more than 200 employees in Northeast Ohio and provides replacement parts to more than 3,000 institutions in the area, including the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. In addition, the company has received numerous recognitions for its growth and contributions to Northeast Ohio — the company has ranked as an Inc. 5000 company and on the Weatherhead 100’s top 20 every year that it’s been eligible. Some other notable honors include multiple awards for World Class Customer Service, the Pillar Award for Community Service and Team Northeast Ohio. The company is also a six-time winner of Cascade Capital Growth Awards.
While leading PartsSource’s expansion, Dalton still finds time to prioritize his faith, family and community. He volunteers his time and leadership abilities to a number of civic organizations, serving several boards and contributing time to humanitarian mission projects each year. Dalton was recognized personally for his entrepreneurial efforts with the prestigious honor of “Entrepreneur of the Year” for Northern Ohio in 2004.
How to reach: PartsSource Inc., (330) 954-1632 or www.partssource.com
