Case Study
Becton Dickinson standardizes requests in its LATAM operation with Pipefy
How the multinational healthcare company manages customer registration requests from over 20 LATAM countries
About BD
Becton Dickinson (BD) is one of the largest global medical technology companies in the world. The company is advancing the world of health by improving medical discovery, diagnostics, and delivery of care. One of the most important pillars of BD is supporting heroes on the frontline of healthcare by developing innovative technology, services, and solutions that help advance both clinical therapy for patients and clinical processes for healthcare providers.
Nowadays, BD employs over 75,000 people and is present in more than 190 countries around the globe.
Before Pipefy
In 2021, BD closed the year with $20 billion in revenue, divided into three main categories: Medical, Life Sciences, and Interventional. Considering all these segments, BD has a diverse customer base: hospitals and clinics, research institutions, laboratories, government institutions, and more.
Until 2021, one of the main challenges of BD’s Latin America sector was gaining efficiency in the customer registration process. The LATAM’s Master Data team is responsible for customers in over 20 countries, but the teams, divided into Chile, Brazil, and Mexico, used to manage the process with different tools.
On the first attempt, the team used tools such as ServiceNow, SharePoint, email, and spreadsheets to handle all customer registration requests. Some frequent problems the Master Data team experienced were:
- To register a new customer, a series of documents need to be collected from the beginning of the process, but receiving requests through many channels didn’t allow the team to ease the request input.
- Decentralization. Each team managed the process differently, making it difficult to track the status of each customer, measure SLAs, and extract data from each step of the process.
- Too many manual steps in the process. It was difficult to automate the process, and the team needed to dedicate considerable resources to these specific workflows.
As a result, there was no way to track a detailed SLA per area involved in the customer creation process. To become a supplier of a public company or a governmental institution, for example, BD needs to participate in bidding processes, so in these cases, a delay in the customer registration flow might eliminate BD unnecessarily from being in the running.
After causing delays and realizing the process needed to be more efficient, the Master Data team decided to move their operation to a single platform in September 2021. The team searched for platforms already used in BD and pursued the best solution.
We needed to receive many documents to register a new customer. In our previous tech stack, we couldn’t show requesters which documents were mandatory, depending on the type of customer. Our last solution wasn’t flexible enough and email didn’t deliver the standardization we needed.”
Karem Canto
Customer Master Data Specialist
After Pipefy
BD’s journey with Pipefy started in 2019 when other departments adopted the platform. Canto, a Customer Master Data Specialist, and the Master Data team used Pipefy for some workflows in 2020 and decided to test Pipefy for this new challenge too.
The main reasons they decided to adopt Pipefy fully include:
- Ability to collect mandatory documents depending on the type of customer. Other tools didn’t deliver the flexibility and the conditional logic to change the request form depending on these criteria.
- Close support from the platform. Due to the critical nature of our processes, the Master Data team needed to have quick support.
- Intuitive platform. Requests are created by employees in different countries, so the platform needed to be intuitive enough to overcome language and culture barriers.
- Flexibility to adapt and change workflows. The processes are dynamic and no other tool offered the possibility of being administrator and modifying certain parameters.
Nowadays, using Pipefy, the Master Data team has created a portal centralizing all forms to collect internal requests, like customer registration and customer inactivation. With a single portal, the team could standardize requests coming from all countries in LATAM, one of the main pain points they previously experienced.
With Pipefy’s implementation, the Master Data team positively impacted the three main stakeholders of this process:
- Requesters who can easily find the right form to submit all documents and follow the status of their open requests through automatic emails.
- End-users from the Master Data team who receive all information necessary to process the requests and can save time by automating manual and repetitive tasks.
- Managers who can measure SLAs, control process quality, and increase their team’s efficiency.
Results
Less than one year after implementing Pipefy, the Master Data team already has results to prove the success of this partnership with 20 active processes running in Pipefy.
The most important result they’ve had is a better experience to offer stakeholders, like internal clients, end-users, and managers. All of these groups have a better understanding of the workflow and can quickly track the status of open requests.
By combining standardization and automation, the team also improved efficiency,, which has been tracked by two main indicators: SLAs and FTEs. Internal customers can now track and receive their requests on time, avoiding problems on the sales side. Additionally, there used to be 4 employees dedicated to the customer registration process alone — now they have dropped to 1 FTE. The other 3 employees have been allocated to positions of higher value to the company.
In addition, the process of attracting investors (in which Pipefy acts as a CRM) experienced some of the most positive results. Over the last five years since Pipefy’s implementation, the hospital managed to double the total of funds raised.
In parallel, the Finance team reduced their time spent on sales related tasks by 65% by automating tasks, such as sending monthly bank slips to investors.
Next Steps
Pipefy has been a BD partner since 2019 when the company started using the platform for customer requests. Nowadays, over 600 employees in 12 departments are using Pipefy and the partnership keeps expanding.
At the moment we started to search for the ideal platform, our IT department indicated Pipefy to start managing this operation. The flexibility was key and the IT team now can trust that Pipefy will be a partner for more operations.”
Karem Canto
Customer Master Data Specialist