Leveraging Artificial and Business Intelligence to Drive Productivity Improvements

Jaime Velez, Co-founding Partner and Senior Consultant at Operations and Quality Systems Improvement Experts (OQSIE), will join us at the American Medical Device Summit 2019, where he will speak about “Leveraging Technology and Artificial Intelligence to Accelerate Improvements in Effectiveness and Productivity in the Supply Chain.” Ahead of the summit, we spoke to Jaime about the importance of leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and business intelligence (BI), how medical device manufacturers can begin to do this, and how OQSIE can help.

How do you define AI and BI? How do you distinguish between them and how do they work together?
AI is a very broad term that can encompass many things. Generally speaking, it’s software that thinks, in some ways, the way a human expert would. The critical business value of AI is that it can generalize and recognize common patterns — thus being able to automatically spot anomalies or to make recommendations based on past experiences. BI tools are designed for decision makers of all levels with actionable information about company performance. Actionable means that the information can be acted on and presented in a way that is understandable to the person receiving it. It’s about using data to drive relevant conclusions to better understand, and grow, your business. AI excels in interpreting very large and complex data sets. That information can then feed into a BI system, which applies algorithms and rules to identify positive or negative trends and alert leaders to specific areas. By combining AI and BI, companies get the best of both worlds: speed and scale. They benefit from the massive data-processing capabilities and speed of computers (AI), combined with actionable, business-impacting information that is driven by analysis, exception identification, and escalation protocols (BI).

What is the number one reason to begin thinking about leveraging AI and BI?
Speed is the biggest reason. Today’s businesses have massive amounts of information generated by more and more sources. In many ways, there is a human factory of people spending significant amounts of time accumulating, organizing, and manipulating data. Instead of using data to drive rapid decisions, achieve business objectives and generate a profit, companies are spending time and resources to find relevant information buried in their data with often such a lag in time that the issues needing attention have happened without a timely response. This is where AI and BI can make a huge impact, by making large amounts of data actionable. A combination AI/BI system assimilates and analyzes large datasets, but also allows for the right conclusions to be consistently made, at the speed of computing. It finds patterns in data, augmenting human analytics, and automates escalating the exact piece of information, in the most appropriate way, to the right person.

What are some ways medical device manufacturers are already leveraging AI and BI?
A survey of life sciences organizations shows the majority now describe themselves as very data-driven. But while 70% of biotech and pharma companies say they are using data effectively, only 30% of medical device companies say the same. We hear the same types of concerns from our clients. Many companies employ some form of Master Data Management using multiple data sources to rectify poor data quality and correlate information. However, even the most robust MDM solutions rarely incorporate all the data sources and repositories with a company, preventing it from being a single source of business truth. The integration of AI and BI systems is still in early stages within medical device companies. The first step is awareness of the possibilities for AI/BI systems and the second is a company-wide commitment to data as a common asset, designed to be shared not siloed.

What are some ways medical device manufacturers could improve by leveraging these things? What’s the best place to start?
Medical device manufacturers can quickly benefit from an integrated AI/BI system in terms of productivity, exception identification, line efficiencies — all things that directly impact the company’s bottom line. The best way to start is by understanding all the data sets the company relies on and then connecting them to create one version of the business truth. Companies are often shocked to find out how many secondary reports, pivot tables, and spreadsheets are created by well-meaning employees in order to gather critical data. Once all the data feeds are centralized into a single source, a mechanism for creating actionable insights must be created. This is where the combination of AI and BI allows for insight analysis, exception filtering, and automated escalations. By analyzing anomalies — both positive and negative — and comparing those to trends, history, and goals, the AI/BI system can quickly escalate critical information to the person who can act on the data. The true goal of an enterprise-wide data system should be to quickly get the right information, at the right time, to the right person. This is where automated systems excel: In cross-referencing large datasets, comparing them against norms, classifying the outcomes and then escalating appropriately.

How does OQSIE help medical device manufacturers to leverage AI and BI?
OQSIE allows companies to quickly gather all the data scattered around their business to identify areas of improvement, driving top-line growth and bottom line savings. Beyond data aggregation and discovery, we partner closely with clients to understand the key drivers of their businesses. Proprietary algorithms learn what typical and normal performance looks like, and how that changes over time. Then, identifying notable exceptions — both positive and negative — compared to history, trends, and goals, and escalating to relevant parties, makes the OQSIE solution unique. It’s estimated that up to 80% of people within an organization spend 30-40% of their time reporting, analyzing, and maintaining data. The OQSIE solution frees up employees to work on growing the business and be proactive, rather than being reactive and trying to find problems. Simply put, it increases the speed by which medical device companies can run and radically improves productivity and profitability by deploying human capital against bottom-line results. By freeing up significant employee intellectual capital and re-focusing those efforts on high-value work, OQSIE helps businesses grow, improve profits, and make people’s jobs more value-added. And because the solution is tailored to their business and running 24/7, it ensures the right people get the right information at the right time to improve operational efficiency. We were founded on expertise and focus on improving operational performance. Helping clients understand what is driving their business and detecting abnormalities across different datasets and systems is critical to maximizing operational excellence.

To learn more, join us at the American Medical Device Summit 2019! Visit the event program to view our speakers, sponsors, and attendees.