Becton Dickinson optimizes workflows with Performance Analytics to better serve healthcare pros

Becton Dickinson empowers the frontline heroes of healthcare and medical research
Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD) advances healthcare, worker, and patient safety by creating products that improve medical discovery, diagnostics, and care delivery.

These products help advance medical research, enhance the diagnosis of infectious disease and cancer, improve medication management, promote infection prevention, equip surgical and interventional procedures, and support the management of diabetes.

As a result of those efforts, BD has grown into one of the largest medical technology companies in the world since its founding in 1897.

BD knew ServiceNow helped employees do their jobs more efficiently, but needed to know just how well the streamlined processes were performing
Like with any organization embracing digital transformation, IT is the backbone of the company—and providing fast and efficient services to its employees is paramount to its success. To that end, BD deployed ServiceNow to streamline and simplify IT workflows and automate redundant tasks. For example, assignment group managers had to approve changes in group members, even when the manager was the one who made the change in the system. Now, approval is automatic when initiated by the manager.

While the company knew that it had improved its processes, the questions remained: Exactly how well do those processes now perform? Was business value being realized from this investment?

“There’s a lot of monitoring and controlling of a process once it’s been implemented, and ongoing optimizing and iterating,” says Stephen Rodgers, Senior Analyst at BD. “You want to be able to improve a process once you’ve implemented it, but how do you know you’re improving it if you don’t know how it’s performing?”

For that insight, Stephen turned to ServiceNow Performance Analytics.

Performance Analytics gives BD the intelligence to see how well its processes are working
“Performance Analytics is the best product in the ServiceNow suite. It lets you know the baseline performance of any process, so as you attempt to optimize and improve it, you know if you’re doing the right thing, if you’re flipping the right switches and levers,” Stephen says.

BD uses Performance Analytics to monitor and control processes throughout the organization.

Stephen continues, “This lets me see what’s happening with those processes or workflows at any given time. You wouldn’t have that information otherwise.”

For example, Performance Analytics lets the company compare similar processes across regions. If the mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) of those processes is wildly different, the team can dig in and find out if there’s a legitimate issue with local legalities, or if a workflow needs to be tuned up.

Even when processes are optimized, Performance Analytics can offer insight into unfortunate events. When an automated business rule in a req-to-pay (RTP) process broke, no one noticed until an anomaly was spotted in a Performance Analytics breakdown.

Stephen also uses Performance Analytics to model hypothetical changes to workflows based on data collected to know how the change will impact the business.

All this information allows BD to determine if it needs to invest in improvements.

For BD, this additional insight defines success
“Without Performance Analytics, companies attempting to improve processes and workflows will be less successful,” Stephen says. “Just launching a process into the ether and not knowing what it does is not the definition of success.”

Stephen continues, “Using Performance Analytics to monitor how a process is behaving, if, when, and how you should iterate, and if other optimization attempts have been successful or not—that’s the definition of success for us. And, that’s why we put Performance Analytics on everything.”

Performance Analytics saves BD time, resources, and money
According to Stephen, without Performance Analytics, BD would have had to invest significantly more operational costs and labor hours while utilizing multiple products and manually pulling together data from multiple sources to get the same information.

“Performance Analytics eliminates the need for that,” he says. “It really allows us to get exception-based management, so that we don’t spend time investigating something that is already performing well. Instead, I can spend my day being productive and improving what isn’t.”

On the other hand, problems are also clear at a glance. “If there’s a problem, I can see that right away and know I need to get on that,” adds Stephen.

That response can save BD significant time, too. For example, over a six-month span, a finance RTP process had an MTTR that was steadily increasing until it peaked at around 31 days, compared to the average of 15 to 20 days. Stephen’s team noticed the increase in Performance Analytics, intervened, built a couple of catalog items, attached some workflow, and pulled out those ticket types. That process now takes just three or four days.

“That was almost two years ago, and the fact that I can look up the specifics, get hard numbers, and see the process is indeed still in control proves the value of Performance Analytics,” Stephen says. “I was able to get those numbers in five minutes. Performance Analytics is what gives you the hard data that proves your intervention had value.”

Performance Analytics also provides peace of mind and efficiency in collecting metrics
“Native to the Now Platform, Performance Analytics allows the BD teams to gather metrics efficiently—including metrics we otherwise wouldn’t be able to collect at all,” says Stephen.

It also provides peace of mind. “That’s an underrated but critical benefit,” he says.

Stephen recommends companies starting the journey to optimize processes and workflows begin extracting value from Performance Analytics right away. And for those who aren’t using it, his advice is, “Use the technology that ServiceNow makes available to you.”

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