Precision performance measurements for a medical devices firm

Every enterprise works best with a clear picture of its key performance indicators (KPIs). This global medical devices company knew this, but its breadth of operations around the world was obscuring the KPI view.

The organization has four main business units – a restorative therapies group, a cardiovascular group, a diabetes group, and a minimally invasive therapies group. The issue? Each unit had its own supply chain, operations, business risk, HR, and quality functions, so there had been little opportunity to build universal consensus around how to arrive at these all-important numbers.

As a result, the five functions were calculating some 80–100 performance measures inconsistently, with each function measuring KPIs using its own logic based on discrete data sources. What's more, some of these functions had their own legacy systems – remnants of past acquisitions – that further contributed to the muddle. And because accessing metrics was a highly manual and time-consuming exercise, people weren't making full use of the intelligence they offered.

All this meant that teams weren't sharing best practices. For example, if one unit's supply chain was healthy – meaning its inventory was up and it was meeting demand – it had no way of passing on its lessons learned to other units with supply chain challenges. There was no transparency into how the enterprise as a whole was running. Ultimately, the firm didn't have a strong sense of what was working well, so leaders couldn't make fully informed decisions or plan effectively for the future.

The chief operating officer (COO) recognized how these obstacles were hampering efficiencies – not to mention growth – and wanted to overcome them quickly. That's when he turned to Genpact.

Our grasp of complex business operations, collaborative skills, and speed served this company well. We established a two-year roadmap to put a new KPI system in place, overseeing its adoption and adding more features that would eventually allow for predictive modeling.

We began our engagement by laying the foundations for a more cohesive KPI structure, holding a series of short sprints over several months. During this time, we ran scores of sessions with stakeholders across the five functions to discuss each individual KPI. The purpose was to get feedback on how the teams had arrived at their KPIs and to agree on logic and rules for calculating future KPIs. It was a rigorous exercise.

When we'd reached a consensus, we rounded up all the data from every source that the five functions used so we could cleanse, standardize, and centralize it.

Next, we took all the stakeholder feedback, analyzed the scrubbed data, and, using customized software, applied everything we'd learned to create a single source of truth in a dashboard: Ops Cockpit. Ops Cockpit provides a clear visualization of the now-consistent, regulated performance measures related to supply chain, HR, quality, business risk, and operations. It also lets users get a granular look at how effectively sub-functions are operating. As the COO says, the dashboard is so easy to use, it's encouraging employee buy-in.

Ops Cockpit's newly standardized KPI templates give the business a clear, consistent picture of operational performance, accessible on an easy-to-operate dashboard. And because the solution provides a 13-month history of metrics, leaders can see how a function is progressing over time.

Additionally, the solution's heat maps analyze KPIs for insights on supply chain, employee and customer experience, and more. So, the company can pinpoint risks – and mitigate them – before they have a negative impact on the bottom line or business.

Leaders are now looking forward to enhanced business decision-making as they harvest intelligence from uniform KPIs.

Finally, thanks to the simplicity of Ops Cockpit – and the clarity it provides – employee adoption is becoming more widespread. And as the company progresses into its two-year plan to make the most of Ops Cockpit, the firm will add more features to the dashboard to eventually use what it learns for predictive business modeling.