How a medical device maker took control of its sales data

For medical diagnostic equipment maker Alere, master data management was the key to unlocking its digital transformation."In hindsight, we carried our legacy process for years and years," says Jason Jarrett, senior director of business intelligence and solutions at Alere. "If I could do it again, I would have done this sooner. You're skeptical about disruption, but it would have been better to go ahead, bit the bullet and implement."

As a medical device company with annual revenue of about $3 billion, Alere uses third-party distributors to sell its products to hospitals and doctors' offices. To process incentive compensation for its sales force, it purchases data from those third-party distributors to evaluate sales performance and changes in market share. But getting the information on time and processing data from disparate sources — each distributor uses a different reporting method — became a significant challenge.

"We would have one distributor call it Florida Hospital, spelled out in its full name," Jarrett says. "We would have another call it FL Hospital. We would have another call it a completely different name. So aggregating that information for our sales force was impossible."

"It's in inconsistent formats, not standardized," he adds. "The reps, you know, would have a great month and all of a sudden they're waiting for their paychecks. It brings to light a trust factor. With the process, we needed to improve the timeliness, we needed to improve data integrity and also generate a platform that people could consume the information and Alere could use it to evaluate market changes and react to it in a much more timely manner."

With limited visibility into their own customer base, Jarrett made it his goal to transition Alere to a single-source data strategy with an integrated customer master that could be a data and reporting foundation for the entire organization. The first step was to get the customer data in order.

The only problem? Alere has 50-plus distributors and little in the way of incentive to get them all to adopt a common technology and process. Even if it could achieve that, Alere's finance personnel would still have to clean the data and manually process it using Access and Excel. As with any manual process, accuracy and timeliness were issues. When errors were discovered the team had to start the entire process over again. Jarrett says a whole team of analysts and managers were spending more than 500 hours per month cleaning and processing data.

Share it:
Share it:

[Social9_Share class=”s9-widget-wrapper”]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

You Might Be Interested In

Battling Data Demons with Data Governance

19 Mar, 2017

The stories you hear on the news often mention how this person or that person was battling their demons. Alcoholism, …

Read more

Why it’s important to operationalize big data into daily tasks

9 Jul, 2020

Big data analytics can do more than just deliver reports to decision makers. It can help with a company’s day-to-day …

Read more

AI’s Role In The Future Of Data Privacy

5 Jul, 2021

The power to do everything online is something of an ideal. Buying groceries, seeing your doctor via telehealth: the possibilities …

Read more

Do You Want to Share Your Story?

Bring your insights on Data, Visualization, Innovation or Business Agility to our community. Let them learn from your experience.

Get the 3 STEPS

To Drive Analytics Adoption
And manage change

3-steps-to-drive-analytics-adoption

Get Access to Event Discounts

Switch your 7wData account from Subscriber to Event Discount Member by clicking the button below and get access to event discounts. Learn & Grow together with us in a more profitable way!

Get Access to Event Discounts

Create a 7wData account and get access to event discounts. Learn & Grow together with us in a more profitable way!

Don't miss Out!

Stay in touch and receive in depth articles, guides, news & commentary of all things data.