Anyone who has ever been in a hospital has benefited from instrumentation from Becton Dickinson. The 120-plus year-old life sciences company provides a wide range of capabilities that help healthcare providers by improving medical discovery, diagnostics, and the delivery of care. The company’s offerings include cell analyzers, cell sorters, software, sample prep devices for medical research, cancer screening tools and drug delivery systems, and home health care devices.

With such a wide array of applications, users in different parts of a healthcare organization rely on Becton Dickinson’s products, explained Kristen Weaver, Becton Dickinson associate director of service infrastructure and technology. And in the rare circumstance where these products malfunction or need servicing, the company needs fast and reliable support.

“We rely on ServiceMax to create the service cases and to help shorten the time to service requests,” Weaver said at ServiceMax’s annual Maximize conference. Users need the Becton Dickinson equipment to be operational at all times to avoid delays in diagnosis and treatment. After all, any delays could be detrimental to patient health. 

One of the company’s latest implementations of ServiceMax technology is the customer and partner portal, which Becton Dickinson now offers its nine service distributor organizations in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and South Africa. The portal provides a shared resource for Becton Dickinson, its customers, and its service partners, connecting all the parties involved and thereby optimizing service interactions.

Improving Collaboration and Transparency With a Shared Portal

Without a real-time online system, communicating and collaborating with service partners was a challenge, which made the company vulnerable to potentially disastrous delays. But, thanks to the partner portal, Becton Dickinson is now leveraging the cloud to assign urgent service tasks to support partners and keep them connected in the field.

For example, the portal includes social-based collaboration tools, so that technicians can communicate with fellow technicians and back-office experts when faced with unfamiliar situations or new problems. Technicians can easily pull up corporate knowledge bases, how-to guides, and repair videos to provide better and more complete service, enabling them to more quickly diagnose and fix equipment issues, usually in a single visit.

Meanwhile, on the customer side, the collaborative portal has empowered users, offering more transparency on service interactions. Because it offers self-service capabilities to customers—meaning they can schedule service appointments themselves as needed—they maintain control over the interaction, reducing operational costs and boosting satisfaction, according to Weaver.

Maintaining Security and Seeing Success

Security of the portal was a major concern for Becton Dickinson, given the sensitivity of medical information. So the company worked with ServiceMax to ensure that there was a robust process in place to ensure data privacy in the portal.

“We wanted to make sure that our partners would use it,” Weaver said. The solution? Becton Dickinson started with a very simple implementation, leveraging their existing data model in which Becton Dickinson was the primary or “parent” account, with each of the partners in the portal set up as secondary or “child” accounts. This structure ensured that security was maintained because the child accounts weren’t given access to patient data. 

Thus far, Becton Dickinson has seen success. The percentage of service requests resulting in same-day fixes jumped from 60 percent to 100 percent, and the service requests fixed on the first call has risen from 82 percent to 99 percent.

There have been other advantages to the portal as well, according to Weaver. “Local service leadership is better engaged with their customers. They’re able to demonstrate the ability to provide good service and to offer in-depth in-person training.”

Another big value from the system is the ability to quickly create service reports, which are critical for record-keeping and proactive maintenance. This is because most details from service interactions are automatically entered, rather than relying on time-consuming manual data entry.

“There are some big incentives for using this system,” Weaver said.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

This topic was presented as a part of ServiceMax’s Maximize Chicago conference in October 2019. The session titled “Successfully Outsourcing Field Service” was co-presented with Dawn Plaskon from ServiceMax.