The challenge
Waiting in an airplane on a runway due to an equipment issue is one thing. Lying on a gurney ahead of a surgery is quite another.
To prevent delays due to the failure of its endo-surgical equipment, a large U.S. manufacturer routinely sends highly trained sales personnel to visit hospitals and examine each piece of equipment. Not only is that process painstaking, it is also extremely costly. It creates opportunity costs, as well: all the service activity results in lower sales. Further, the manual nature of maintenance means the company responds to failures slowly.
Our approach
The device maker tasked Cognizant with improving its service and maintenance process. Each of its devices already stores important data, including surgery type, tool usage, surgery time and total lifetime usage. We helped the company create an automated process to remotely capture this data, eliminating field personnel site visits for simple data collection.
We also devised an IoT instrument that plugs into the device maker’s existing equipment, preventing major deployment delays and ending device recertification in the field. Data about each device transmits automatically, enabling better maintenance planning and faster remote updates. Immediate issue identification reduces downtime.
