Unifying Systems for Seamless Global Operations

Unifying global operations, with a focus on the product value chain (R&D, manufacturing, service), and the goal of enhancing the quality of products and services the company can provide, relies on being able to seamlessly connect systems and processes across lines of business, production facilities and even regions. Increasingly, we’re seeing the use of capabilities such as digital threads, digital twins, and product lifecycle management to streamline processes, integrate systems, and operate more efficiently in an increasingly fragmented digital landscape.

For companies such as Fresenius Medical Care, unifying systems creates an opportunity to harmonise technical and human processes across all stages of product development and then scale globally. To achieve seamless unification, it is crucial to first establish a solid foundation on which consistent and comprehensive organisational transformation can be built, helping to level the landscape for ongoing product development and innovation to take place.

From Regional to Global

As with any form of digitalisation, the first step in the change process is to create a company mindset and culture that embraces new technologies and ways of working. Historically, Fresenius Medical Care – and the wider medical industry at large – would typically operate with a regional mindset. This means that any North American product was produced and delivered in North America; in EMEA, they were produced and distributed here. This established regional marketplaces that were closed off from one another.

In order to offer support and products on a larger scale, it’s important to connect these regional markets, especially as customers now want the ability to access products that meet their needs regardless of their location. It’s in this context that unifying conventionally isolated systems can help in the transition from a regionally focused company into a global one.

Embracing this approach means that global products can be designed anywhere, built anywhere, and shipped anywhere. Within the medical sector, this makes patients’ lives much easier due to a consistency of service and treatment. Encouraging this type of transformation also enables the smoother development of future products. By having a wider pool of data analytics pulled from a variety of different markets, it helps inform design processes for ongoing product improvement.

A Single Source of Truth

With so many global sites integrating into one system, there will be a lot of different data sets that need to be consolidated. It’s important to create a single source of truth for your data from which all users can pull. This enables easier collaboration across all levels of operation, accelerates development processes throughout the organisation, and builds a foundational capability from the ground up on which future progress can be made.

When embracing digital operations even something as simple as enabling digital signatures can massively streamline processing capabilities and generate efficiency gains. At Fresenius Medical Care, this meant that approval cycles, which previously took 30 days, were reduced to just 1.5 days.

The transition to a unified system can also enable greater collaboration. Efficiencies can be gained through being able to work more effectively as information and data is updated across multiple sites simultaneously. Factors such as end-to-end traceability also mean that product risk assessments can be completed more quickly and effectively than was previously possible.

Restructuring data operations into a seamless ecosystem can also be done without impacting existing compliance measures. By having all relevant information in one place, managing crucial regulatory information for products is integrated into the process from the start, rather than requiring individual changes in separate locations at the end of the process.