Chad Kirchner, Analytics and Content Management at Medtronic - Cardiac Rhythm Disease Management

Elizabeth Rendon

Medtronic is the world leader in medical technology providing lifelong solutions for people with chronic disease. They offer products, therapies and services that enhance or extend the lives of millions of people. Each year, 5 million patients benefit from Medtronic's technology, used to treat conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, neurological disorders, and vascular illnesses.

The global leader in medical technology, Medtronic's success has been partly due to strong relationships between its sales force and their physician customers. As the company has grown, the volume of sales data has increased and required business analysts to spend large amounts of time gathering and formatting sales results. Over time, it became difficult to deliver timely sales and customer information to company executives as well as the sales team. This has a negative impact on the ability to service customers and drive performance. Medtronic launched a business intelligence initiative with the objective to measure and monitor key sales metrics and provide customer centric information. This has allowed them to decrease the reporting production and distribution overhead by creating "Command and Control" dashboards that are available to a variety of roles within sales, marketing and finance organizations. These dashboards integrate information from multiple systems and repositories including the enterprise data warehouse, several transactional systems and several XL spreadsheets. Not an existing Siebel CRM customer, Medtronic selected the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (formerly, Siebel Business Analytics Platform) to deliver a set of applications to aggressively measure and monitor sales. The solution is used by 2,000 users and provides insight to key data such as devices sold per region, physician loyalty, new products sold versus old, pending purchase orders and other metrics to three of Medtronic's five major divisions (Cardiac Disease Rhythm Management, Cardiac Surgery, Vascular). The first phase of the solution was successfully deployed after only 3 months. The benefits have been extremely positive. In the words of one Area Finance Director, "The solution provides water for a thirsty man." In addition, the company has been able to divert over 5,000 hours of work annually.