CASE STUDIES
Here are some case studies from previous deployments of
Kyocera’s 6035 smartphone.
The Kyocera 6035 smartphone eases administrative burden, improves service
quality and delivers multi-million dollar ROI to GE Medical Systems
GE Medical and Edify
Background
General Electric Medical Systems (GE Medical) manufactures high-quality medical imaging systems and provides services and productivi-
ty solutions to hospitals worldwide. GE Medical’s offerings include networking and productivity tools, patient monitoring systems, conven-
tional and digital X-ray, and clinical information systems.
GE Medical’s computer tomography (CT) scanners cost anywhere between $300,000 and $1 million. The company offers service and
extended warranties on its equipment, making fast maintenance response and the highest level of customer service critical to its success.
GE Medical employs 2,400 field service engineers to maintain and repair its CT scanners in accordance with these service warranties.
GE’s CT field engineers were spending a third of their time on mundane administrative activities associated with each service call. This part
of the job was so taxing that engineers notoriously delayed filing paper work for days at a time. Meanwhile, the GE Medical extranet allowed
hospital administrators to check on the progress of a service request. If the paperwork had not been filed promptly by the service engineer,
the administrator would be led to believe that the service call had not been completed, and that GE was not honoring its service warranty.
Business Challenge
Up to this point, field service engineers carried laptops and mobile phones. While the laptop gave the engineers access to the information
they needed, it was seen as a hindrance among all of the other tools they must carry to complete their work. Instead, they usually would
place a call to the GE operations center and have the information relayed from a computer screen. This was a common occurrence, for
example, when the engineer had ordered a part that had not yet arrived. The engineers’ difficulty in accessing necessary information often
resulted in multiple visits to diagnose and maintain the expensive hospital equipment.
To help alleviate the administrative burden, GE Medical sought to reduce field engineers’ administrative work from 30 percent to 5 percent
of their time. This would allow for service updates to be posted to the extranet in four hours, instead of the one week that had become typ-
ical; and ultimately, CT engineers could spend their hours where it mattered, with the customer.
Solution
GE Medical sought to fundamentally rearrange the workflow of the CT engineer field force. Service engineers exchanged their laptops and
mobile phones for Kyocera QCP 6035 smartphones. An all-in-one solution, the Kyocera smartphone combined a mobile phone, Palm OS®
handheld, and wireless e-mail and Internet access, in one device.*
The CT scanners, connected through a virtual private network, relay self-diagnostic reports to the GE Medical operations center. A field
engineer, in turn, can access this information remotely via the Kyocera smartphone. Running Edify’s Enterprise CRM software on the Palm
device, engineers have a head start on ordering parts and checking their shipping status. A link to the FedEx Web site also allows the engi-
neers to see who signed for a part. When a hospital administrator says they haven’t received a part, the engineer can immediately look up
and see who signed for it.
Implemented in November 2001, the deployment cost GE Medical $3 million, including the development of the Web-based applications
and the purchase of the Kyocera smartphones. Originally the program was tested with 800 CT engineers throughout the U.S. By June of
2002, another 1,500 smartphones were deployed to the vast remainder of field engineers.
Given the lack of enthusiasm the CT engineers had expressed for mobile technology when equipped with laptops and mobile phones, man-
agers were pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm they have shown for the Kyocera smartphones. The company reported that the transi-
tion to the new technology was one of the smoothest in recent memory. Field engineers appreciate that they can complete service calls
independently and no longer need to call the operations center to retrieve information. Instant access to data allows them to share real-
time service status with customers. The Edify software allowed engineers to file reports immediately and without much labor, giving hospi-
tal administrators a much more accurate and timely representation of when their service request was completed.
Anecdotally, GE Medical reports that the project has been a morale booster to its field force. Engineers appreciate that the company invest-
ed in them to increase their productivity. This appreciation is evident in the enthusiasm with which engineers are now proposing other wire-
less applications for their Kyocera smartphones.
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