A company’s IT department can be a place where operational efficiencies can be achieved, but Medtronic (NYSE:MDT) CEO Omar Ishrak wants to wield IT as a tool for growth too.
A Wall Street Journal blog post recounts how Ishrak, who is coming upon his one-year anniversary at the helm of Medtronic, approached Medtronic’s chief information officer for assistance in achieving this.
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In turn, CIO Michael Hedges evaluated the medical device giant’s IT systems and decided that faster processing of information and better compiling of global sales reports would do the trick. And in the process provide competitive advantage over its rivals.
Specifically, Hedges wanted to find a way to quickly sort the volumes of information about medical devices issued by hospitals as well as by patients — typically they are product complaints.
Realizing that current IT systems would be unable to take the load, the company turned to German business management software maker SAP and its HANA system. As a result, processing speeds were cut dramatically from three or four hours to three or four minutes.
The plan is to slowly make HANA ubiquitous — by year’s end, between 5,000 and 7,000 of the company’s 40,000 employees will be using the system. By 2013, that number is expected to jump to 15,000. Within a few months, 3,000 sales reps will be using the HANA-powered global sales reports.
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Of course, the investment will take time to achieve a return, but speed is the killer app in the 21st century and so it makes sense for Ishrak to want a system upgrade that provides this advantage.
Here is a SAP video where Medtronic IT personnel talk about how they use the HANA system:
