Zimmer Biomet worked with Zentrix to deliver a world-class Power BI based reporting solution used by over 500 staff covering sales, inventory and service. The medical technology giant has improved patient outcomes and saved millions of dollars in the process.

2R02KX9 Warsaw – Circa May 2023: Zimmer Biomet offices. Zimmer Biomet produces artificial bone joints and dental prostheses.

Background

Zimmer Biomet is a global medical technology leader with 26,000 employees and a comprehensive portfolio designed to maximise mobility and improve overall health. The company exists to alleviate pain and improve the quality of life for their patients with innovative products and a suite of integrated digital and robotic technologies. Zimmer Biomet has operations in more than 25 countries and sales in more than 100 countries.

Zimmer Biomet manufactures joint replacements for almost every joint in the body. As a result, they have an enormous inventory of 250,000 SKU’s that demands extremely complex data analytics. They need to be able to group and connect different SKU’s based on how they are sold, where they are consigned and whether the product is an implant or instrument that needs to be returned.

The organisation is globally arranged – global infrastructure, global security, and a global manufacturing approach and required a global solution to its reporting requirements.

Challenge

Zimmer Biomet went live with the SAP ECC ERP solution in 2010 which was then rolled out across Asia up until 2014. At that point, Zimmer Biomet had an SAP BW system connected to their ECC environment and experienced many challenges retrieving data out of that system.

One of their biggest challenges was their complex supply chain and how they service hospitals. Inventory is supplied per surgery, on the day of operation. In many cases inventory is returned, so there’s a large reverse logistics element involved. Another major challenge was people generating their own reports in a time-consuming manner and with no consistency. Each report was generated differently, often producing a different result each time.

Zimmer Biomet found that to develop the BW environment, they would have needed to employ dedicated resources and that was a budget that they didn’t have at that point.

They made the decision to use the SAP extractors in BW to pull data into a SQL Data Warehouse. They then built a Cognos sales and inventory platform over the top. That meant Zimmer Biomet was taking three steps to get data to a user within the BI environment. Over time they found it was not scalable, was expensive to run, difficult to get resources, and essentially, no longer viable.

“It was in late 2014 that we decided that we needed to identify a platform to take us forward. Our business, at that point, was not pushing us for BI solutions, but we knew that that was going to come, and we had no solution,” said Michael Schaeffer, Vice President of IT Commercial Operations.

Solution

Early stages

In 2015, Zimmer Biomet engaged independent consultants to determine what platform was best positioned for their operational needs and data requirements. At this point Zimmer had a very limited BI environment, which only supported their Australia and New Zealand business, and the recommendation was – for their size – that a Microsoft platform would suit the organisation for their scale. Zentrix was chosen to be their data and business intelligence partner. The next decision was how to get the data out of SAP.

SAP Data Services was used to schedule delta extracts using SAP extractors into the data warehouse. The extractors provide a lot of value as they leverage the business rules and logic developed for reporting. Zimmer Biomet was also able to retrieve data from other applications and import it into the SQL based data warehouse which was then used to populate Power BI reports and Dashboards.

Reporting

The team started by building reports they knew the business needed, providing valuable insight into slow moving items, or items no longer required. Zimmer Biomet is now able to reduce its inventory to a much more efficient level, which leads to positive feedback and new requirements from users to further drive improvements. Prior to this report, Zimmer Biomet didn’t have the necessary insight into their inventory situation.

A new inventory PBI report was rolled out providing all the relevant information in one place, both geographically and numerically. It was dubbed the Mona Lisa because it was considered a “work of art” and the name is now a part of the company’s culture.

By having a standard report which everyone uses, the need for numerous reports which only tell part of the story was replaced with a new modern platform that informs the decision making process of inventory managers. That is the true power of a well-designed report—a game changer that Zimmer Biomet had never had before.

“Over $3 million worth of stock has been removed from inventory as a result of this approach and access to this analytics tool.”

Information

Zentrix also gave Zimmer Biomet the tools to help their staff and clients be more productive, and in turn make the business as a whole run better. For example, ROSA is a surgical robot used to assist surgeons with a knee replacement by using CT scans to ensure perfect alignment and the best possible outcomes for patients. Robots are placed into hospitals and then surgeons are trained.

Power Bi has been used to track who has been trained, how they are using the robot and how they are performing. Additional metrics report on how the hospital is performing compared to agreed contracts, which was very important to the compliance and audit group to understand performance for each contract.

Benefits

Moving through a single source of truth in the Power BI cloud is one of the fundamental advantages over Excel. Previously reports were distributed as Excel spreadsheets by email or kept as hardcopies. Clarity of knowing what was up to date was hard to come by.

“Now you know it’s right. You know it’s up to date. It’s just such a massive game-changer,” said Michael.

Zimmer Biomet and Zentrix have developed a close relationship which has delivered multiple reporting projects, driving greater insights into the business and resulting in significant business performance outcomes.

Zimmer Biomet has moved from being a ‘hearsay company’ to a ‘real say company’, talking about real and timely data that drives the direction we invest in.

With training, staff have started to see the true value of data and insights, and decisions are now being made using the data. Power BI is now used in Senior Management meetings to drive better decisions, and the President of the region requested Power BI reports to replace his usual paper daily sales printouts.

Zimmer Biomet has successfully built an ecosystem of 500 users generating reports and developing new ideas for improving efficiency through reporting. The future is to have users building their own reports by pulling data from the data lake instead of SAP.