At RHMDC the stakes are high: medical equipment performance needs to be optimal and uptime needs to be a guarantee; at all times, but especially now. A Field service solution was implemented in eight sprints. IT manager John Scheepers, business development manager Jessica Coppens and quality and service employees John van Bergen and Markus Starreveld look back on a successful implementation process.
Interested in the Dutch version? Read it here >
Reinier Haga MDC offers point-of-care testing by delivering measured solutions and diagnostics to healthcare professionals. Business development manager Jessica Coppens explains: “The fact that Appsolutely delivers the same kind of made-to-measure experience for their clients, works perfectly for us. Our situation required a solid but flexible solution like Salesforce.” Yes, RHMDC had systems for asset management before, but never organized it integrally. Most of it was managed in and spread out over multiple different tools. Coppens: “To properly execute your quality checks on the asset level, you need to integrally know which asset is where and what the specific costs are. At all times, but preferably: real-time.”
IT manager and project initiator John Scheepers adds: “As a lab for evidence-based medicine, it’s highly important that we facilitate the entire process, from maintenance to certification, perfectly. Especially because we deal with (often sensitive) medical results. As Jessica is saying, we envisioned an integrated system that facilitates the processes surrounding medical assets, customer details, quality checks, contracts, and employee certifications. We already used Salesforce, so that was a logical choice!”
The project was kicked off with internal workshops to determine the demands, the expectations and the possibilities. From there, the team worked with sprints in Salesforce Sandbox to build the basic products, instantly use and, more importantly, test them. After this, the solutions were transferred to the production environment and then the project was ready to go live. Quality employee and end user Markus Starreveld explains: “This way of working paid off. Learning from real-life, practical situations is a great way to move forward. As an approach it really suits RHMDC.” The sprints lasted two weeks each and the project had room for eight sprints. “The fact that we took the sprints during the vacation time of various coworkers didn’t make things easy. But in the end, we managed to make it work. That wouldn’t have been possible without Appsolutely’s flexible way of working.”
The RHMDC team enjoyed the experience of working with Appsolutely. “Pleasant, cooperative and approachable. The project team really takes your demands, questions and concerns into consideration and makes sure that you see the results in the end. On the other hand, they really challenged us on the true added value of each user story in every step of the project. Another key aspect: Appsolutely has the extraordinary capacity to pivot and change direction instantly, if that is what the situation requires.”
”All our questions were taken seriously and were approached from a sincere ‘we can make it work’ perspective. On the other hand they knew the (logical) limitations and practicalities of the project. We always knew what to expect: Appsolutely aims to deliver on their promises.” – Jessica Coppens, business development manager at RHMDC
Some parts of RHMDC’s asset management were not fully aligning with the busy schedules of their field workers and complicated field services management challenges, but others were working perfectly fine. “That was our baseline and Appsolutely understood that instantly,” Coppens explains. “They offer pieces of the puzzle, as well as the entire thing, and they really don’t send you off with the priciest package in the assortment. As a healthcare organization, we care about spending our money wisely. You really don’t need a fancy sports car if you can do with a simpler, but perfectly decent solution.”
Now, RHMDC has an all-round, 360-degree insight in their asset management. With that centralized way of working, quality increases and better diagnostics and point-of-care-testing are facilitated. On top of the integration of contracts, certifications and quality checks, a system of serial numbers for reagents and sampling was put in place. Coppens: “Being on the sales side of it all as a business development manager, I need to know precisely what the cost-profit ratio on the customer level is. That complete oversight and real-time access to the current and historic data is a true surplus.”
“Imagine having over a 1000 of your medical instruments on varying locations, at various customers. And then imagine organizing all of that on an Excel sheet. As a quality manager, I can assure you that my work experience got so much better, since the integration in Salesforce.” – Markus Starreveld, quality and service manager at RHMDC
Quality and service employees now instantly register their data in the right place. “Moreover, we now know exactly which employee has which certification to work with specific appliances. The monitoring of that is much easier now. And if a certain certification expires, we can send automated reminders.” John van Bergen adds to that: “On a busy day, I visit five or six GP practices. Manually entering the data slows down my productivity as a quality and service employee. Now, I go to my customers and I just bring one iPad, allowing me to register on the spot.”
Project initiator Scheepers is happy with the results and is looking forward to the future. “Now, the best part starts: working with our new and improved system. Over time, we will add more functionalities and improve the system as we go. For example, we already know that we will use Salesforce for another business unit, to improve our customer contact.” A next step for the quality managers? “For me, that would be delivering automated reports to my customers through Salesforce,” Van Bergen explains. Starreveld concurs: “In the end, the results deliver: as the end user it reduces my administration time massively. Yet there’s always room for improvement. For now, it means that I can focus on the important things: delivering the best service for our clients.”
Photography cover image: Ronald Meekel, www.same-d.nl
