Overview

pSysmex America is lighting the way to better health with diagnostic solutions that transform the future of healthcare and contribute to healthier lives. Its innovative hematology, urinalysis and flow cytometry testing technology is reshaping the world of diagnostics across the U.S., Canada and Latin America. As the regional headquarters of Kobe, Japan-based Sysmex Corporation - a trusted global leader respected for optimizing the efficiency, operations and financial performance of clinical laboratories - it offers diagnostics that equip patients and the health care professionals who treat them with the information needed to make decisions with greater trust and confidence. Forbes magazine named Sysmex one of the most innovative companies in health care equipment and services. /p

Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

p Embarking on a migration journey, Sysmex quickly realized that they didn’t have the bandwidth or resources for proper due diligence and documentation that are considered best practice for larger companies. Moreover, Sysmex also struggled with a lack of transparency in their processes as well as slow and limited reporting , which made it difficult to find inefficiencies and opportunities that would drive a successful digital transformation./p

The Solution

pMigrating a system was daunting, and Sysmex knew that process mining would help. The Intelligent Business Cloud immediately gave them complete visibility over their processes as they actually were so they could not only instantly identify points of friction, but also immediately prioritize them by impact on their business goals. /p p /p pDuring an initial Proof of Value, a project that’s typically done before actually becoming a customer of Celonis, the Sysmex team saw immediate value. Looking at their Order-to-Cash process highlighted crucial, but previously unseen dependencies on the procurement process and they immediately discovered that their largest Canadian customer was subject to credit holds, even though they were removed shortly thereafter. /p pAdditionally, root cause analysis let them identify the process variations that were having the biggest impact on their outcomes, making it easy to prioritize initiatives — and quantify their effects./p

The results

p /p pUnnecessary credit holds: Sysmex was surprised to find how many invoices were put on credit hold for release. Every single one was released, none ever stayed on hold — needlessly driving up cycle times./p p‘With Celonis, we discovered that our biggest customer in Canada had been put on hold because their credit limit was too low. We increased it there and then.’/p pHigh change rates: Another revelation was the volume of delivery date changes. These were primarily from contracts that included a scheduled installation crew — the date would be set automatically, but would then be changed due to logistics on either side. This highlighted opportunities to invest in a more scalable solution. They’re evaluating how to connect new systems which will give a more accurate delivery date./p pMissing measurements: More generally, they knew where improvements could be made in a number of places but were missing the numbers to tell the whole story. ‘Before Celonis, we didn’t have an easy way to measure processing time frames,’ for example. ‘We were using stopwatches and sampling [to measure how long it took to process an order.]’ /p pCelonis made quantifying value and building business cases much easier— enabling better prioritization./p

Metrics

p‘Celonis highlighted so many opportunities we started making changes before we even came out of the validation phase,’ Kris Cheurki said./p pRetrieved over 3.4M in overdue service contracts in 30 days: Sysmex was finally able to drill into service contracts past due, identifying $10M in overdue payments. These are being tracked in their Transformation Center, with every analyst alerted of the amount they’re responsible for. They’ve already recovered $3.4M — in just one month./p pBetter time-to-cash with improved credit management: By revamping their process, including changing credit limits and whitelisting 8-9 customers to make sure their orders wouldn’t be put on hold, Sysmex has sped up on-time delivery and time-to-cash, and has increased customer satisfaction./p

The Technology

pSysmex uses Celonis Intelligent Business Cloud in their Order-to-Cash, implementation services for Purchase-to-Pay and Accounts Payable processes, and uses Celonis to drive their S4Hana Migration and Digital Transformation initiatives, as well as improve working capital. /p

Disruptive Factor

p“We sell diagnostic solutions primarily to hospitals and labs,” says Alex Garini, Sysmex America’s CFO. “But ultimately, our customers are the patients. There is always a person, a family behind what we sell. It could be my family; it could be your family. That’s how we look at the business.”/p pTheir success is reflected in the rapid growth of the business over the last decade: “We have a significant and important market share in the United States as a result of the tremendous growth we’ve seen over the last 15 years,” points out Kris Cherukuri, Director of Enterprise Systems./p pAt the same time, Sysmex America is a mid-size company in a market with some very big players. As Cherukuri puts it, “We have to out-innovate our competition in order to survive and thrive.” For Sysmex, that means fostering a culture of innovation and doubling down on customer satisfaction. It also means prioritizing transformation initiatives by ROI in order to move fast and stay effective./p p“The advantage of being a mid-sized company is that it gives us agility, but there are downsides as well. We have huge process variance because we have to take care of every customer like they’re the only customer.”/p pManaging high degrees of variability while remaining laser focused on efficiency and optimized operations is tough, but with Celonis, Sysmex gets the best of both worlds. /p

Shining Moment

pSenior Manager of Customer Service, Contract Compliance Elizabeth Powell says “Our CFO challenged us to increase the analytic capabilities of the organization — and management specifically — to truly drive data-driven decision-making.” Celonis has a central repository of our Order-to-Cash data, so each team knows what to go after, can put together an action plan and review changes regularly. Teams are confident that they are working with the best data available./p