Medtronic, the largest global medical device company, is passionate about innovation. Normally, its unrelenting focus is on customers and patients, but realizing that great user experiences underpin efficiency and CX improvement, Medtronic turned its attention to improving the employee experience.
Using OutSystems, Medtronic delivered “Click”—a personalized portal serving over 80,000 employees—that makes it easier for staff and managers to find, fix, learn, and request what they need to get work done.
Medtronic develops groundbreaking healthcare technology solutions for the most complex and challenging conditions. The company’s innovation process fuses technology, a deep understanding of the body, and leading medical science to create never-before-seen solutions.
But while Medtronic proudly delivers experiences that put patients first, the user experience for employees had room for improvement. “Our biggest challenges are complex IT and stringent data privacy and security compliance requirements due to our sector,” explains Katia Bartels, IT Director, Global Experience Design and Innovation at Medtronic. “We have a wide variety of back-office systems that are hard to change, so employees and managers had difficulty navigating through different systems to get work done.”
“With OutSystems, we could reimagine user journeys and deliver elegant user experiences without needing to improve, upgrade or replace back-office systems. We had the freedom to identify quick wins and achieve a much faster speed to value.”
Recognizing that streamlined and easy-to-use systems would underpin efficiency and CX improvement, Medtronic launched a “war against clicks.”
With more than 90,000 employees logging in to multiple hard-to-use systems, saving employees just a few minutes per week represented a huge potential efficiency saving. Moreover, removing toil would improve the work-life balance for thousands of colleagues.
Medtronic has used OutSystems since 2018 to develop a variety of patient device monitoring solutions, such as its digital heart monitoring service called FocusOn™. So its development team was confident that OutSystems was well suited to rapidly deliver a fast-evolving employee self-service portal. Medtronic’s requirements included:
Because Medtronic was using OutSystems, the team adopted a very agile approach to the project. Rather than replacing or upgrading any of its back-office systems, they focused directly on the front-end user experience.
Improve employee experience
Modernize legacy systems
Enterprise-grade scalability and security“The beauty of working in a low-code way with OutSystems was the ability to start at the front end and identify quick wins,” says Katia. “We couldn’t wait two years or more to improve, upgrade or replace massive back-office systems. Using OutSystems allowed us to leave all the back-office tech in place while rapidly transforming and standardizing the front-end processes and user experiences.”
"The benefits of this agile and incremental approach were much faster time to value, lower costs, and less risk. Over the long term, we can gradually improve, consolidate, or decommission back-office systems that become redundant."
Medtronic’s roll-out of the Click portal has already reached over 80,000 employees and managers, significantly simplifying their access to numerous IT services, approvals, and knowledge sources. Features include:
The team is currently developing a Medtronic device catalog and service catalog, and upcoming releases will add new capabilities such as device requisitions (e.g. laptops and mobile phones) and enterprise search.
Click significantly reduces the training required for new hires or people promoted into new roles, as Katia describes. “In the past, getting work done often required tribal knowledge, like knowing who to ask, or what system to access. Now, many of these processes are moving into one place, they’re much more intuitive, and require virtually no training.”
In speed trials, Medtronic found that the new process for booking a Zoom training session shortened the time required from 168 seconds to 55 seconds, a 67 percent saving. This amounts to 1,875 hours saved annually if every employee books one training session.
Hear directly from Katia Bartels and learn more about this OutSystems project in 2022's Next Step session.
