When you look to CO2 Partners for consulting, you’ll find an organization with a very different mindset. Unlike many consulting companies that claim they can handle different issues across several markets, CO2 Partners has a laser-beam focus on helping medical device and healthcare companies with starting, growing, or improving the service parts of their business.
Whether your medical device or healthcare company is just starting up, in the growth stage, or into the prime of its corporate life cycle, service can play a critical role in driving growth and profitability, creating an amazing customer experience, and providing essential solutions to your customers’ needs.
The impact of a strong service business is greater customer loyalty, higher employee engagement, and the corporate agility to weather transformational change. We’re all in the service business essentially—because if we’re not serving customers outside the organization, we are serving ones inside.
When you select CO2 Partners, you get an organization that really understands service—people with real “been there/done that” experience. You don’t pay to train someone on the job. You can count on an unwavering commitment to excellence and the delivery of results and recommendations you can immediately act on.
Trust us not only to improve your service, but to make it more efficient, cost-effective or profitable. Trust us to be your partner. We deliver results on time. Every time.
Determining the right service structure
Creating a strong working environment
Choosing services that your customers want
Focusing on continuous process improvement
Measuring Key Performance Indicators
Creating an amazing customer experience
Most medical device and healthcare organizations have a “Triple Aim” (improved patient outcomes, better patient satisfaction, and reduced total costs). How is your organization addressing these imperatives? And how does your service business support this effort? How your service team is structured can make a big difference. Is it a cost center or a profit center? Is the service leader part of the executive team, or not? There is no “cookie-cutter” answer. Determining how to structure your service organization to achieve higher revenues, lower costs, and happier customers is critical. We have the expertise to help you—having led many service businesses (functional, divisional, cost centers, and profit centers) with strong experience in medical device/healthcare organizations.
In his book “The Competitive Advantage,” Patrick Lencioni says that company culture eats strategy for lunch. We agree. A strong company culture creates a working environment where people enjoy their jobs and develop a strong loyalty to the company and its brand. This doesn’t happen overnight. And it can “go south” quickly with management missteps—especially the mishandling of patient safety or the protection of personal private data. In today’s market, with disruption occurring in most industries, creating a strong service culture within your company is imperative. It can make the difference between succeeding—or just surviving—or worse. We know how to help you create this strong service culture. We wrote the book on it—Jumpstart Your Service Revolution.
Whether you’re contemplating adding more service to your portfolio or improving existing offerings so that they can be more cost-effective or profitable, we can help. Our service experience includes on-site field service, technical support, documentation and education, repair services, service parts & logistics, professional services, software maintenance, product recalls, service marketing & sales, SaaS (software as a service), remote monitoring services, call center management, and customer experience management. In addition, we help medical device and healthcare companies bring valuable user insights into their new product development programs—in key areas such as laparoscopic surgical devices, electrophysiology (EP) catheters and equipment, orthopedic and arthroscopic devices, and more. Our experience also includes the unique capability of working with reprocessed Class I and Class II medical devices. We have literally seen it all.
In today’s environment where customers, owners, and shareholders expect more—and at a faster pace—having a focus on continuous process improvement is an organizational “must”. Gone are the days when you could just raise prices to address cost increases. Also gone is the leadership team’s tolerance for clunky processes that are inefficient and don’t add much value. The mantra “cheaper, better, faster” has never been more true. And today we must add to that mantra the importance of product security. Cybersecurity threats are real, and medical devices and healthcare information cannot be compromised. We have service people on staff with certified black belts in Lean Six Sigma. We know how to run a process improvement project and get terrific results—because we have done it ourselves.
How are you measuring your performance? Are your service metrics lagging indicators or leading indicators? If you feel like something may be missing, your instincts are probably correct. We have worked with companies large and small who struggle to land on the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for their business. We often see metrics that are really just activity measures that, honestly, are meaningless and don’t drive business growth and improvement. There are also companies that have way too many metrics, and they tend to get lost in the weeds. When you look in the mirror, where are you and your company? Are you measuring the right things? And are you driving change and making improvements based on these metrics? If not, we can help you. Our service team understands what “best practice” KPIs are—and what service businesses are “best-in-class”. We have people on the advisory board of leading service associations—giving us greater access to more companies and more information. We would love to help you!
At the end of the day, we all serve customers—inside and outside our organizations. Since customers pay the bills, it’s imperative you know how they feel you’re doing. You may have a formal customer satisfaction survey, but are you asking the right questions? And with what frequency are you conducting these surveys? Maybe you have migrated to a Net Promoter Score (NPS), a deceptively simple tool that measures how strongly your customers will advocate for you. These customers are your most loyal and enthusiastic customers. Today, there is an emerging trend to measure the customer experience. This transcends how delighted hospitals and healthcare organizations may be with your products and services—and begins to measure the total customer experience. How much effort does it take customers to do business with you? Are you paying attention to all of details along the value chain? We have people who have many years of experience measuring how happy customers are—and they are on the leading edge of customer experience management. Let us help you help your customers!
Tom Schlick has over 30 years of experience as a customer-focused business operations executive. He is known as a transformational leader, successfully leading organizations through high growth as well as difficult turnaround situations. Tom moves confidently from vision and strategy to tactical development and implementation. He also has the unique ability to build cohesive, high-performing teams that can work cross-functionally in alignment with common goals.
Tom has held COO, SVP, EVP, and VP positions with P&L responsibility at small, medium, and large corporations, both public and privately-held. These companies include Johnson & Johnson (Sterilmed, Inc.), Emerson Electric, ACCO Brands, XRS Corporation (now part of Qualcomm), and Entrust Datacard. Tom’s industry experience spans healthcare/medical devices, process control, transportation/trucking, secure ID/financial services, and office products and equipment.
In all his roles, Tom has excelled at training and developing both individuals and teams, increasing their business acumen and preparing them to drive change in the workplace. From a functional perspective, Tom is particularly adept at delivering results through operational execution, developing customer service and new revenue streams, and leading global multi-site ventures.
