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Changing to a customer-experience mindset
According to Worthington, although moving IT to think of itself as an “internal service provider” is a big undertaking requiring detailed technical analysis, cultural change management is the “bigger challenge.” The team believes that good change management depends on solid agreement and active steeringcommittee membership by all IT leaders. To address these challenges, Cisco has established an IT steering committee that brings together a broad team with diverse opinions and perspectives in order to facilitate this transformation. The goal of the group is to bring value to all layers of the organization as it manages change.
Worthington and Diaz believe that the impetus for transitioning to a service management philosophy should come from the top. The chief information officer (CIO) must be 100 percent committed and articulate this commitment clearly to all business stakeholders. Although the company is still early in the process, it expects that delivering on customer expectations with regard to services will be a big part of operational and performance reviews going forward.
Services need to be measured on criteria such as the number of capabilities delivered, the quality with which they’re delivered, and the cost at which they’re delivered. These criteria become measurements of the customer experience. Worthington says. “There is really only one set of metrics that matters; the rest are diagnostics. The ones that matter are the experience metrics.”
By building a service management strategy based around this concept of customer experience, IT has increasingly delivered services in alignment with business requirements and priorities — further demonstrating its value as a strategic partner. The team responsible for service management has made sure as part of its analysis to tangibly demonstrate the financial benefits of its efforts. Diaz estimated that his Commerce IT team alone saved $1 million in the final quarter of 2008 through more efficient service management as supported by Worthington’s group. Such results will likely further Cisco’s program to transform IT into thinking of itself as a services business.
Varian Medical Systems
Varian Medical Systems provides equipment and solutions for cancer-treatment centers. In addition, the company provides industrial testing products and
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x-ray linear accelerators for cargo security. The company’s more than 900 service representatives are responsible for the company’s products, which are located in more than 5,000 locations worldwide. Varian implemented a service management strategy to add efficiency to equipment, device, and software service. The main goal was to evaluate the management process in terms of servicing the linear accelerators and software provided to oncology clinics.
Defining the challenges of the industry
When you understand how the equipment is used, recognizing the service challenge is easy. Radiation oncology treatment centers use linear accelerator machines to provide radiation treatment to cancer patients. The linear accelerator is a very large unit that must be located in a specially designed concrete room. Outside the concrete room, the medical oncology team uses computer software, medical imaging technology, and other equipment to plan, deliver, and monitor treatments. A lot of patient data must be recorded to determine optimum treatment and monitor the accuracy of ongoing treatment. Radiation oncology is a highly technical part of cancer treatment that requires precision in both the equipment and the health-care team.
Many problems can interrupt the continuous operation of the equipment. If the patient database goes down, for example, radiation treatment must stop because that database holds the information regarding patient equipment settings.
The main challenge for Varian was the time it took a technician to reach a site. Service calls generally involved several hours of travel time and then several hours to complete the repair. For customers in remote areas (such as in South America), the mean time to respond was much longer. Software questions could often be handled over the phone, but as Varian’s products became more complex, it became increasingly difficult for customers to describe problems over the phone. Dan DuBeau, program manager, remote access and Mission Critical Application Protection (MICAP), says, “You can have a help desk representative on the phone with a customer, and they are talking two completely different languages.” In 2000, the Varian team began looking at remote-access solutions with the expectation of improving the service level provided to customers.
Implementing a remote-access solution
Varian Medical Systems had two main goals for implementing a remote-access solution: decrease service call mean time to respond and decrease escalating
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travel costs. In addition, the company hoped to solve some of the communication problems that occurred when staff members tried to resolve customer problems over the phone.
Now when a customer uses Varian’s software products, either managing patient information or setting up a treatment, IT support can access the customer’s desktop remotely. A support representative can use the mouse and keyboard remotely, and the customer can see exactly what the Varian representative sees, watching the mouse move and viewing every keystroke. This solution is a great educational tool as well. Often, a customer needs to be trained. Also, if an on-site representative runs into something outside her area of expertise, she can have an expert from Varian access the application remotely and help the representative through the fix — a side benefit that Varian didn’t expect.
Creating a rotating service desk
In addition to providing remote desktop support, Varian representatives work on the company service desk. Most service representatives work from home, and many of these representatives do it all, repairing a piece of equipment one day and working on a mainframe computer the next day. Varian also has two service forces out in the field.
The service representatives rotate their work responsibilities. A local representative in Seattle, for example, normally would drive or fly to a customer site to fix a problem with the equipment. One week of the year, however, he stays at home with a computer and instant-messaging software to take
direct customer calls. If he gets a call that requires someone on-site, he redispatches that call; otherwise, he handles the call remotely.
After Varian implemented its remote desktop solutions, it took a while for all the representatives and customers to use the system. The reality is that nothing replaces face time with a customer, so initially, the representatives were hesitant to use the product. Now most customers — indeed the vast majority — insist on remote access.
The company also has become more proactive in its problem management. The idea is to track what the customer’s doing now and send a dispatch to the customer before a problem occurs. Varian is currently looking at the lifetime of consumables — such as field lights on radiation therapy devices — to predict at what point a particular part of a machine will go out. Then Varian can send a service reminder and proactively change an important component before it fails.
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Measuring the impact of service management
From a business standpoint, the company knew that it needed to determine the impact of the remote desktop solution. As DuBeau put it, “It is hard to measure what you are doing, but it is almost impossible to measure what you are not doing. And that’s what we really want to measure.” Varian is trying to measure how much has been saved by reducing travel time.
One metric that the company can track is remote-access usage hours, which totaled 17,000 in one month, including remote database upgrades and modifications. Varian used this metric and other data on service requests and responses to calculate cost savings and the new mean time to repair. The savings have been significant, amounting to a 20 percent overall reduction in expenses due to the following:
Reduced numbers of overnight hotel stays and plane tickets
Increase in productivity resulting from decreased travel time and better customer communication
Reduced number of service representatives required due to the increase in productivity (one representative can do three jobs in the time it used to take to do one)
An additional benefit is that Varian has an accurate audit trail of what customers it has accessed, which helps customers meet compliance regulations such as HIPAA. The more the company automates its process, the easier it is to validate and verify that processes are sound. The true benefit of Varian’s improved service management approach, of course, is one that can’t be easily measured: delivering treatment to patients on time.
Chapter 20
Health Care
In This Chapter
The Medical Center of Central Georgia
Independence Blue Cross
Sisters of Mercy Health System
Partners HealthCare
The U.S. health care industry is facing a perfect storm of challenges. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and other
government regulations require providers to adhere to national standards for electronic records and transactions. Health care providers and payers must cope with many other pressures, including an aging population, a growing number of people without medical insurance, falling government reimbursement rates, and a growing shortage of qualified staff members.
In this difficult environment, health care insurance companies need to manage the relationships with health care providers and consumers. Pharmaceutical companies need to leverage data and best practices successfully across the entire health care system to ensure that they develop medicines to address emerging needs.
At the center of this storm, medical costs are skyrocketing. Controlling health care costs while ensuring quality of care has become a hot issue for this industry. Service management is emerging as an important strategy for meeting these challenges. Addressing problem and change management helps to decrease the down time of critical technology that clinicians and nurses use to treat patients and manage care, for example. The hospitals and insurance companies profiled in this chapter believe that service management helps reduce costs and ensure improved quality of care.
Innovation has become critical to success, so many companies are looking at ways to innovate. In this chapter, we profile four companies’ service management efforts: