Data is the gift that keeps on giving. Varian, a Siemens Healthineers company that develops and produces medical equipment, discovered how powerful data insights can be not only in identifying service trends and quality issues in newly-released equipment but also in informing new product iterations and increasing responsiveness to incidents.
Author Radiana Pit | Copperberg
Photo: Freepik
In the final keynote session from Field Service Forum UK, Varian’s Director of Product Lifecycle Services, Michael Kenny, and Aquant’s Service Principal, Sidney Lara, discussed how Aquant Service Insights enabled the medical equipment manufacturer to leverage data to:
- Support the less experienced workforce with knowledge collected from the retiring workforce;
- Service customers better by drawing from data to create products with increased lifecycles.
New product iterations tend to be more complex and present unforeseeable challenges. Varian uses Aquant’s solution to solicit real-time product information that provides insights into both the customer and technician experience with the product in order to identify patterns that enable a quick response time.
This automated data process has helped the company save time and resources, decreasing the burden on service engineers that had to sift through massive amounts of data and build arguments around it. With the automated solution, the manual process of dumping and refining data that used to last six to eight weeks was reduced to three weeks. Now, the company has access to irrefutable datasets much quicker while also taking the engineer’s emotional bias out of the equation.
The solution also gave the service organization the ability to include aggregated metrics that provide a more granular view of regional or industrial criteria, which inform a more personalized response for each customer.
Most importantly, by harnessing the power of data, Varian reached a deeper understanding of how machines—that are otherwise too fresh to the market to offer historical baseline data—functioned in real-life scenarios by emulating use cases and events before going on site.
CRM data combined with analytics from medical devices also enabled the company to understand the aftereffect of product quality or serviceability issues. This understanding tied back to analog analytics indications was easy to transform into a future alert that can prevent downtime events for the customers—an OEM provision that is vital for the medical industry.
