How can you engineer innovations for maximum customer value and business impact?

Author: Kishore Chivukula, Philips Senior Systems Architect

Innovation is one of the cornerstones of staying relevant and competitive for a business while ensuring you continue to deliver value for your customers. For healthcare in particular, the success of any innovation is determined by the fine balance between problem-solving, customer adaptation, business impact and technology choices.

But how can you make sure that your organization is making the right innovations: those that matter and have an impact?

What does it take to deliver innovations at scale, at speed, and on budget?

In my ten years of experience at Philips (this is my second tenure) as an engineer and a member of multiple engineering teams, I helped deliver innovations in platform development, cloud, and serviceability. It’s here that I learned that ‘engineering innovations’ is a discipline that helps bring ideas to market through a holistic view of the customer, business, and technology.

What I’ve learned is there are three pillars that help to build a culture that fosters innovation.

Pillars of an innovation culture:

Information sharing

○ Ensure information flows seamlessly to all levels about customers, business challenges, competitors, and, most importantly, what is and isn’t working.

○ Based on this information, engineers can relate to any problem that comes to them and know how to find the best approach to navigate it.

Customer interactions

○ Allow every engineer to listen to the voices of key customers regularly.

○ Encourage them to silently listen-in on customer interviews, participate in user acceptance testing (UAT) sessions or meet unhappy customers.

○ See how they come back with new roadmap items that can be the key differentiator for products and services.

Platform to collaborate and innovate

○ Organize hackathons, developer events, and brainstorming workshops.

○ Encourage networking sessions where teams can learn from each other through coffee or lunchtime discussions, enabling them to understand each other’s challenges and see if there are synergies for collaboration.

○ Create opportunities that allow engineers to solve challenges in multiple ways and finally pick the one that delivers the best solution.

Engineers are typically assigned to solve technical challenges. Notably, the most successful organizations are those which adopt a culture where engineers are asked to work on solving customer and business challenges using technology.

Let me make it clearer by sharing a high-level view of three innovations in which I took part.

These innovations cover three different categories:

● Business challenges

● UX challenges

● Technical challenges

Business challenges

An Architect I worked with visited one of our factories in the Netherlands to understand the pain points in the system configuration for one of our core products. In the integration phase, a factory engineer typically takes time to follow manual steps, integrate, and test the system. Any mistake in configuration causes repetitive work, which costs the factory time and money. The factory asked us to simplify the process and make it foolproof to support all kinds of configurations that would deliver a new product line efficiently.

Our team ideated this first as a hackathon idea. We automated the entire process from the customer’s SAP order to system configuration in one click by creating a factory tool and deploying it to the production floor. This innovation saved the factory ~2400 hours a year while helping Philips deliver more products and serve more customers.

UX challenge

Hospitals need healthcare systems with high availability to treat patients and save lives. Philips service engineers use the Log Viewer tool to quickly diagnose any field problem in case the system ever has a breakdown, apply fixes and bring the system back online for the customer. Performance issues are reported with the Log Viewer 1.0 when loading a file of monthly data. The viewer tool didn’t support lazy loading and couldn’t load multiple files, making it challenging for engineers to resolve issues on time.

Our team created a solution to load the logs efficiently using chunk load, DB indexing, customizations, and added breakthrough capability to predict problems using field knowledge. Redesigning the backend service used by this tool was my Greenbelt project and helped me understand the value of ideating in a structured manner. The final solution helped engineers save 15 minutes on each log file, which would have been the time spent to identify the root cause and decide the action needed to address the customer’s challenge.

Technical challenge

For development of one of our flagship next generation serviceability platforms, the business decided to use existing field service software from the previous platform to meet market commitments and reduce engineering costs (minimum of three person-years).

The new platform and existing software used different technologies (C++, COM, Web and .Net) and had to work on a medical system flawlessly. Our team took it as a challenge, developed a proof of concept using WIN32 API and Automation to finalize the approach. Reliable integration and successful delivery were achieved in less than 9 months.

I chose the above three examples for their uniqueness and impact. But as you can imagine, teams at Philips create plenty of innovations every year, and I am lucky to be part of such teams where you learn something new every week.

Through my experience, I’ve learned that expanding your skills to pick the right customer challenge, associating business value and identifying suitable technology will ultimately help you as an engineer to deliver successful innovations.

Curious about working in tech at Philips? Find out more here