Cutting Edge Business Insight Tools for Your Medical Device Business

By Scott Frappier | April 26, 2019

As a key decisionmaker in your organization, one of your many jobs is to stay up to date on incredibly fast-moving technologies available for your medical device business. Regardless of how “technical” you are, that’s a big job -- and we’re here to help. This 3-part blog series is designed to help you get clear on how technology supports mission-critical business functions for your organization.

Financials/BI

Multiple roles within most organizations need a holistic ability to view, pull reports, and act on information across multiple aspects of the business, starting with clear line of sight into financials. With a tailored, multi-dimensional line of sight into your numbers, the management team can make informed decisions and move quickly on them. So, is it important? It really, really is.

Trust Your Business Insights

If you’ve built a strong infrastructure for your business processes, then you know making fast, informed decisions based on accurate reporting puts you and your team light years ahead of most competing businesses. In a recent study by PwC, 2/3 of business executives report their company’s decision-making is “somewhat or rarely” data-driven.

If that translates to the Medical Device market (and based on our expertise, we think it does), that means if you build your internal processes around making reliable data-driven decisions, you’re in the top third of the businesses out there. And since most medical device startups fail*, deciding to make the investment in this area can be the difference between succeeding or flaming out long before you get your device into the market.

So, how do you know you can trust your financial data? By building medical device specific, tested integrated business insight mechanisms into every aspect, every fiber and molecule, of your internal functions.

Goodbye to Inefficient Processes

Build efficiencies directly into your business, regardless of the stage your medical device concept is in right now. With the right solution, you can access current (and correct!) financial data and bring in multiple reporting (financial and non-financial) sources for full-view analytics.

For example, let’s look at a hearing aid device project. You can set up your BI dashboard to track investments, accounts payable, KPIs, defects, potential upcoming sales activities, customer feedback, shipments, returns – anything, anything at all - that impacts the numbers. If you need to share data across teams (and every organization needs to do this), it’s easy with the right solution. In fact, with the right solution, just-in-time data is available for all possible views, and teams can make fast, reliable decisions.

End User Tools

Your Power BI solution can make individual roles in the business immensely more efficient.

Do you have to issue a recall? It’s no fun, but it’s a reality in your business on occasion, and we believe in being ready for it. Can you quickly track shipments to customers, vendors, all components, even the most infinitesimally small ones? Your team needs fast access to details like lot and region, and a clear line of sight into even the smallest components of the device, so they can act before someone gets hurt. Once you’ve built and tailored your Business Insight dashboards, your end users can access the information they need, when they need it, and keep your business operational.

At the end of the day, where the team once spent most of their time preparing data, now they can spend their time on analyzing the information for better-informed decisions.

End users need a line of sight into specific data for myriad reasons: inventory returns, tie outs, reporting. Providing easy, interactive access to data that empowers them to get their jobs done with reliable information is possible with the right solution and clear-headed vision developed by you and your team in partnership with your solution team.

Full Control Over Your Financials

It sounds like a simple idea, right? Put all of your financial data -- actuals, budgets, statistics, inventory, payroll, investments, vendor costs, and so on -- into integrated, easy to access, interactive reports. If your company has been piecemealing your solutions, you’re not alone. And it’s not too late to fix it. With the right financial and infrastructure tools in place, you can significantly simplify processes and empower your employees to analyze and act in the best interest of your company, without requiring a conversation with someone who’s more “techie” first every time they need to access the data.

Of course, none of this is simple, and every business has different needs. That’s why one of the most consequential decisions you can make in your business is picking the right partner to bring your financial insights to life. We spend a lot of time in our business helping our clients fix systems that don’t deliver what’s really needed. It’s a lot more fun for us, and efficient for you, to build the right systems the first time.

Have you fully vetted your partner for their integration chops?

  • Why it matters: Other companies will tell you they know how to integrate your disparate systems, but that very much depends on how much experience they have with the technology, the depth of their understanding of the medical device manufacturing “language” you speak, and so many more variables. Getting the integration right, without breaking what you currently have in place, is essentially important.
  • Why Stoneridge: The reason we at Stoneridge Software are able to reliably connect internal systems is that we work with the most stable, state of the art business tools from Microsoft. We have deep expertise in these tools AND the medical device manufacturing niche. We make a plan and work with what you have, so nothing breaks during the transition. Our goal is to keep you fully operational while we improve your internal business processes with integrated systems! Our deep institutional expertise with Microsoft’s business tools and with medical device manufacturing, so we’re able to help our customers upgrade information systems without churn and with a fully vetted plan.

To learn more contact our team or download this eBook for comprehensive technology recommendations for your medical device business.

*1 in 4 startups fail, and 98% of digital medical device startups fail.

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