Siemens Healthineers required a platform that supports business
growth
Siemens Healthineers is one of the world’s leading
providers of medical technology and services, enabling healthcare
providers to transform care delivery, improve patient experiences, and
expand the use of precision medicine.
As an indication of the company’s truly global reach, more than
600,000 Siemens Healthineers’ systems are installed with customers
spread across 75 countries. Every hour, over 240,000 patients are
“touched” by a Siemens Healthineers system or service, and more than
70% of critical clinical decisions around the world are directly
impacted by the company’s technology.
The company’s sheer scale and long history within the larger Siemens
organisation prior to its IPO meant the IT landscape underpinning
operations was complicated. The business was saddled with a lot of
inflexible apps that only had one, or a few, dedicated use cases and
the company’s IT infrastructure consisted of disparate siloed systems
and services.
As Jochen Hostalka, Head of IT Customer Services and Enterprise
Services at Siemens Healthineers, explains: “Our previous IT systems
presented a multidimensional picture. It’s a genuinely huge company
with a long history, which meant the IT infrastructure had a long
heritage. As the IT team, we could see clearly that we had a lot of
‘pipes’, but what we really needed as a business was a platform.”
The complexity of a simple mission: to move Siemens Healthineers’
IT landscape “from onsite to online”
The opportunity to
overhaul Siemens Healthineers’ IT landscape came with the
formalisation of its new customer service business strategy. The core
driver behind this strategy was summarised in the tagline “from onsite
to online.”
Despite the deceptively simple statement, the scale of the challenge
involved in realising that goal was vast. It was clear that the IT
operation needed to become a modern, digital organisation to meet the
needs of a truly global business—but this presented big challenges.
“Our set up is very complex, but that meant we really needed to
focus on the fundamentals. In the past, we had only tried to make
tweaks to our internal IT landscape. The refocused business strategy
was a massive opportunity to take a step back and adjust our landscape
to properly support the future of the business,” explains Jochen.
As the need to embrace digitalisation took shape, there were two
goals that focused the IT team. The first was enabling the business to
do more with the resources they had and to boost productivity. The
second was changing habits and demands of the company’s customers.
Siemens Healthineers’ customers—hospitals, doctors, radiologists,
and so on—are embracing digital IT services in their work, and their
patients and “customers” are particularly digitally savvy. As Jochen
puts it, “Our customers are more and more online driven, so we needed
to be online too.”
ServiceNow optimises and complements existing infrastructure with a
new “gene code” for IT delivery
The IT team realised they
needed a solution that would add a new dimension to the infrastructure
and systems that were already in place, rather than ripping and
replacing the existing set up.
“Given the huge complexity of our existing systems and the critical
nature of what we deliver to our customers, we couldn’t simply burn
down what we had and start again,” says Jochen.
“We needed a solution that would optimise and complement our
existing landscape and unlock greater innovation, accessibility, and
integration. We needed a solution with a different ‘gene code’.”
Jochen and his team focused on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
solutions, appointing Accenture as a strategic partner to lead
analysis of the market leading solutions. This four-month analysis,
including a proof-of-concept phase, centred around identifying the
best technological, financial, and strategic fit with the business.
ServiceNow was the clear preference across all three dimensions.
From a technical point of view, there was a strong fit with the
technology that Siemens Healthineers already had in place. In terms of
strategic fit, the proof-of-concept phase demonstrated that ServiceNow
could also match the long-term goals of the business.
But, as Jochen explains, there were other factors that ultimately
had a bigger influence on the decision to implement ServiceNow. “The
biggest surprise of the selection process was the cultural fit between
Siemens Healthineers and ServiceNow,” says Jochen. We have a big focus
on efficiency and measurement of KPIs, and we could really see
ourselves in how ServiceNow operates. They fit into our service
operations seamlessly.”
