Company
The Getinge Group is a publicly listed, Swedish-based group of companies that focus on ensuring safe and sustainable healthcare worldwide. The organization is divided into three business areas: Extended Care, Infection Control and Medical Systems, and operates under the ArjoHuntleigh, Getinge and Maquet brands, respectively. The Group operates in the areas of surgery, intensive care, infection control, care ergonomics and wound care. Currently, the Group generates sales of SEK 25 billion and conducts sales through proprietary companies throughout the world. Production is conducted at facilities in France, Canada, China, Poland, the UK, Sweden, Turkey, Germany and the US. The Getinge Infection Control business divisions for Life Sciences provides solutions for infection control and contamination prevention and focuses on state-of-theart medical technology. The Getinge Infection Control organization has 31 subsidiaries on six continents and over 230 distributors and partner companies in sales and service.
Getinge Infection Control (consists of two business segments; healthcare and life science. Getinge’s healthcare division provides solutions for infection control, and its life science division provides solutions for contamination prevention. Getinge leads the way worldwide with innovation and technological progress in the field of disinfection and sterilization. Combined with the other two business areas (Extended Care (ARJOHUNTLEIGH) and Medical Systems (MAQUET)), the entire Getinge Group focuses on state-of-the-art medical technology.
Business Challenge
As a leading global medical technology provider, Getinge aims to ensure not only the safety of its customers, but also to remain compliant with evolving healthcare regulations and loss-prevention standards across the world. Four years ago, Getinge was managing different databases, mostly lotus notes and different processes for each factory it owned, putting the Company at risk of lost records, incomplete items and overdue tasks, in turn making it nearly impossible to keep track of the data necessary to maintain the organization’s growth and success on the corporate level. Getinge realized its conventional database alone was no longer an efficient solution to support business development. It was evident that a more effective solution was needed to control the quality of data that was centralized and easily accessible by factories associated with Getinge Infection Control.
Solution and Implementation
After assessing several software solutions from different vendors, Getinge selected Sparta Systems’ TrackWise quality management software to streamline its reporting and data presentation needs.
Getinge began its implementation of TrackWise 7.06 four years ago by adopting complaint handling and CAPA (Corrective Actions/Preventive Actions) applications. Today, the Company has executed a total of 18 processes with TrackWise, both internally and externally. The quality system has been expanded globally into 9 factories and 36 sales companies which are in the process of upgrading to TrackWise 8.74. All data from TrackWise is integrated with data from Getinge’s ERP system allowing them to investigate findings and close root cause on product failures thus eliminating the risk of reoccurrence of failure.
Results
Getinge rolled out TrackWise in August 2010 in an effort to streamline its business processes and ensure it remained compliant with evolving regulations to allow the Company to grow significantly across the globe.
Streamlining its data management processes has allowed Getinge to considerably improve operational efficiencies by reducing the amount of open records or inventory by 63% and decreasing the average cycle time from 2013 to 2014 down to 48%. With TrackWise, Getinge has been able to more effectively and efficiently pinpoint the sources of different issues that have come to light, and because all of this information is contained in one central database, it is much more accessible to the Company’s employees. With less issues lying around, Getinge was able to reduce its compliance risk as well. This user-friendliness has led to increases in both resource utilization and collaboration across multiple teams and office locations.
