Case - Integrating new businesses within Philips Healthcare

How Philips Healthcare Uses Intelligence Plaza to Achieve Sustainable Growth

Interviewed for this case was Daniel Cho, Director of Market Intelligence, Patient Care & Clinical Informatics (PCCI) at Philips Healthcare. Daniel Cho explains how Intelligence Plaza® helps PCCI to integrate new businesses and manage knowledge transfer and sharing in a very complex organization of internal and external partners, to achieve sustainable growth.

Background on Philips Healthcare

In 2009, the Philips Healthcare business accounted for nearly 33 percent of Philips’ overall sales, being the company’s second largest contributor to sales:

  • Sales:            EUR 7,839 million
  • IFO:               EUR 591 million (7.5% of Healthcare sales)
  • Employees:    Approximately 34,000 (29% of Philips total)
  • Headquarters: Andover, Mass., USA

The Patient Care and Clinical Informatics business is one of the four main business areas within Philips Healthcare, and includes Patient Monitoring, Respiratory Care, Perinatal Care and Cardiac Care.

Interview

Q: Daniel, can you tell us what is the positioning of the Philips Plaza, PHID, in your organization? Who is it targeted for and what is the main purpose for the tool?

“PHID is a global platform for knowledge transfer between various organizations within PCCI, a 2 billion EUR business within Philips Healthcare that consists of nine Business Units and over 30 individual businesses. In the past, managing communications and knowledge transfer was a very complex task, as we have a very complex matrix organization in the markets, and they serve many different businesses within Philips.

Some of our external partners also found it difficult to obtain real time information from Philips to help them drive their business. So, we have developed PHID, which is a combination of real time News Alerts for Industry, Competitors, and Market Movements; as well as a well organized database for useful customer presentations, sales tools, Market research reports and other useful documentation to help people manage their business.

Currently PHID has 1650 users, distributed into 60 countries and people ranging from the EVP of the business (Highest rank, CEO level), to the end customer facing selling and servicing staff. The purpose of PHID is focus on one thing, Sustainable Growth."



Q: Any specific features you would like to highlight?

“Yes, there are quite a few very useful features in PHID worth mentioning:

  • Mobile Access (via Smartphone)
  • Competitive Profile & Benchmarking
  • Market Information & Healthcare Statistic Benchmarking
  • iForum for instant knowledge sharing
  • Portal function to have single log-on for other websites and applications
  • 18 levels of Security based on a Person’s job nature and accessing rights."


Q: When you were considering different options, which were your main reasons for choosing Intelligence Plaza?

  • “Plaza is very flexible to adapt to our ever changing environment.
  • The team in GIA is very professional and responsive.
  • The system is very feature rich, and extremely user friendly.
  • The Category Concept allows users to select what they need to subscribe to, so we can teach them how to fish, and not fish for them.
  • Publishing is very easy, so we do not have bottlenecks on capturing knowledge."


Q: Finally, what are the benefits and success stories of PHID for the Philips Patient Care & Clinical Informatics organization?

“PHID is instrumental in the success of PCCI in the recent integration process of new businesses and acquired companies. Without PHID as a common sharing platform, accepting these six new Business Units and 20+ new individual businesses would be a nearly impossible task.

Now, by simply including them into PHID, we can start capturing new knowledge from these new partners, sharing with them our collections of Intelligence (500,000 EUR worth of secondary research materials in their area of interest), as well as capturing the competitive moves, and provide them with guidelines on how to win deals based on good practices in other successful regions.

The iForum also allows us to capture in real time sales people's questions and findings in the market. For example, we are able to predict what competition is releasing by learning from rumors in various markets, and able to provide early warning to management and marketing team to prepare for the counter strategy way before the product was launched in public. This allows us to pre-train the sales people to proactively differentiate our solutions, rather than reactively defend their position when encountering new challenges.

Management loves the news alerts, and are now increasingly choosing them as the only source of news they subscribe to, as each news piece is totally relevant to them (based on customized alert profile). We have continuous positive feedback also from senior executives. Many users read our daily alert messages as their first e-mail of the day.

The new mobile access is awesome, helping many people get updated while on the road. In our last NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey we had 42 as a score, with over 54% of users recommending our service to their colleagues. Out of the 1,650 users, 60% are by referral. None of these users are forced to use the system, and they are free to unsubscribe at any time.

So far, we have had only five requests to terminate the subscription, after three years of service. We are extremely happy with the vendor support from GIA, and will continue to be their happy and proud customer."

 

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