Advanced medical devices are vital to successful clinical outcomes. But state-of-the-art equipment is worthless if it fails to work when needed. After comprehensively redesigning its service operation, Getinge, a global leader in medical technology, has found new routes to excellence – by working more closely with customers than ever before.
Service excellence is something of a commercial mantra, but what does it mean – and how do you deliver it? In late 2019, Getinge UK and Ireland launched a project to find out. The initiative saw the company redesign every link in its service chain from a customer-centric perspective, transforming the service that customers now receive.
“The value of effective service,” says Mark Graves, service director at Getinge UK & Ireland, “is not about how quickly we at Getinge can respond or how often we have an engineer on-site. It’s about ensuring our customers have their necessary equipment working and available when they need it. For the customer, that is all that matters.”
After Mark Graves’ appointment late last year, Getinge decided it had to get much closer to its customers to provide the service level required. That meant overhauling its entire UK service structure – a six-month process during which the organisation left no stone unturned in its efforts to raise the bar.
Today, every customer has specific, locally based engineers assigned to its sites. This setup not only facilitates more rapid response but also forges deeper relationships and closer partnerships. Customers have the peace of mind of knowing the individuals who attend their site; the engineers acquire in-depth knowledge of each customer’s specific needs.
The changes have also enabled Getinge to offer out-of-hours support at an affordable price, accompanying customers as they increasingly gravitate towards seven-day operation.
“We’ve transformed how we approach and deliver service,” Graves says. “End-users and clinicians know they will receive the right level of support from the right person at the right time. Being geared up to offer seven-day service if required is another huge leap forward for our customers.”
Having acquired a variety of brands and organisations over the years, Getinge discovered that its internal service structures had not kept pace with its growth. Service processes had become outmoded and were falling short of the company’s core values to put the customer at the centre of all its activities.
Engineers were spending too much time on the road rather than at customer sites. A diverse product portfolio meant that technicians were not always fully acquainted with each customer’s equipment when arriving to perform maintenance or repairs.
Wholesale change was needed. The first step was to create a more locally-based service organisation. The company decided to assign a primary, secondary and tertiary engineer for every product, product type and portfolio at each customer site. The technicians are locally based, allowing them to develop close relationships with customers over time.
“Customers now know who their service engineer will be and are fully aware that person will be performing their maintenance,” Graves explains. “They also know who their regional service manager is if there is a need to escalate, who their clinical specialist and sales specialist is, and who their senior level point of escalation is as well.”
Deploying service personnel more locally through a stronger regional focus has reduced travel time, significantly cutting Getinge’s carbon footprint. Since engineers now spend a higher proportion of their time at customer premises compared to being on the road, the organisation has become more efficient. “By being smarter about how we deploy our resources we have been able to reinvest in our organisation to provide a higher level of support that in some cases actually costs less. So instead of increasing prices, we have done exactly the opposite.
We’re delighted to have been able to do this: everyone wins,” Graves says.
A stronger local presence has been made possible by a nimbler, more agile organisation. In the past, the company would receive a call and pass the information to an engineer who would then contact the customer to arrange a visit. Now, a nationwide service response unit handles incoming calls and immediately triages them and assigns a responsible engineer in the relevant region. Often a local response is under way before the call is over.
Getinge has boosted technical expertise levels among frontline staff, hired more engineers and introduced validation and regulatory-approved qualifications for maintenance staff. It has also launched an internal training programme that includes an apprentice and trainee engineer scheme.
“What we want to do is to build our technical leadership by developing our own engineers from within because finding engineering resources is ever more difficult and these are critical competencies that our customers need,” Graves observes
Getinge service engineers now work to flexible schedules, an innovation that has proved popular with customers and staff alike.
“Some of our engineers start work at 5am and finish in the early afternoon, others prefer to start in the afternoon and work into the evening. We also have technicians on a four- or five-day week, two days of which are weekends,” Graves explains.
“This is ideal for customers because it means we can serve them round the clock. Our engineers can do the school run in the morning or afternoon and still fit in a full day’s work, or they can have a full day off in the week to support their partner and then work one day at the weekend.”
Graves stresses that providing effective service means constantly adapting to customer needs. “Seven-day and out-ofhours service is something that we offer now because this is increasingly asked for and expected by customers. If there’s something different that we are not doing today, please ask us because we are absolutely geared to respond to it.”
Another key trend is the shift towards preventive maintenance through equipment monitoring using sensors and web-based connectivity. When requested, Getinge’s new service organisation is fully enabled to support these technologies and to provide a seamless maintenance and repair service.
Predictive maintenance enables faults to be detected before they cause a breakdown and permits much faster reactive maintenance in the event of a malfunction. If a device fails in the middle of the night, Getinge will know before the customer and most likely can have an engineer on-site before the customer is even aware there is an issue.
“This is obviously a huge asset when it comes to ensuring quality and maximising equipment uptime,” Graves notes.
How, then, have customers responded to Getinge’s new service structure? According to Graves, the reorganisation, fully implemented since April 2020, has been a huge success.
“We already see that customers are keener to enter into a partnership with us. A couple of our larger clients didn’t think our goals were achievable due to the breadth of our product portfolio we support. But after seeing it in practice, they now want to partner with us as their preferred service partner instead of assuming the risk themselves and managing it independently, as they did in the past.”
Such feedback makes all the effort worthwhile. “It’s truly rewarding to see the increase in customer confidence and to know our clients trust us to manage all their service needs. And of course it helps that we have been able to make these improvements at no extra cost or, in some cases, at a lower cost than before.”
For Getinge, service excellence is at the centre of what the company stands for and what its customers need from their products. It is also a growth area, and the objective now is to build on the organisational changes and develop ever-closer service partnerships with customers.
“We are not just selling a service contract as used to happen in the past. We are passionate about excellent customer service and want to be part of the conversation rather than just a transaction,” Graves comments
“What we have achieved in the last six months is phenomenal and transformational. We are now offering everything from oneshop preventive maintenance all the way to fully managed services of key facilities – and that’s a strong base on which we now aim to build.”
About Getinge
With a firm belief that every person and community should have access to the best possible care, Getinge provides hospitals and life science institutions with products and solutions aiming to improve clinical results and optimise workflows. The offering includes products and solutions for intensive care, cardiovascular procedures, operating theatres, sterile reprocessing and life science. Getinge employs over 10,000 people worldwide and the products are sold in more than 135 countries.
The UK & Ireland service organisation employs 145 people, the vast majority of whom have an engineering background. Launched in October 2019, the Service Excellence Project involved 35 people and was completed in April 2020.
Getinge UK & Ireland
Phone: +44 (0) 1773 814730
Email: uk.marketing@getinge.com
Web: www.getinge.uk
