Medical device manufacturer increases efficiency and flexibility of their IT infrastructure with Quest’s comprehensive 3rd party hardware support and break/fix solutions

Challenge

A multinational medical device manufacturer works closely with its customers worldwide to ensure that they have what they need to deliver quick and confident diagnoses to their patient base. The device manufacturer needed to deploy and support an extensive high-quality imaging system infrastructure across 600+ worldwide customer locations as part of a fee-per-study model that reduces upfront expenditures and eliminates future upgrade costs. This initiative included the installation, maintenance, and support of all the necessary IT infrastructure to perform their radiology studies, including servers and storage, and scanning of equipment. To make this unique model work, the company needed to meet customer service level agreements (SLAs) while maximizing per-study cost efficiencies.

Solution

The medical device manufacturer needed a solution that would support equipment beyond the IT manufacturers’ typical 3 to 5 year warranty periods and meet the response capabilities and performance required. Of its approximately 23,000 servers and 2,000 storage area networks (SANs) accommodating roughly 21 petabytes of critical customer data; nearly 7,000 pieces of equipment were out of warranty. In addition to supporting this legacy equipment, the company needed to put in place the necessary resources to perform ongoing upgrades and replacements across its customers’ facilities and data centers worldwide. Lastly, it had to plan and execute a five year, one-time infrastructure transition as the company moved to a new server hardware vendor.

The manufacturer chose Quest International to handle its maintenance, moves, updates, and other support, as well as supporting activities to a new server hardware vendor throughout its customer base. Quest was able to provide the medical device manufacturer with a large and highly skilled support infrastructure they could leverage that spans hundreds of field personnel at locations throughout the world. Quest’s team could provide extended warranty service in every major global region.

Results

After partnering with Quest, the device manufacturer was able to deliver and manage all necessary service and performance guarantees. Enabling them to efficiently provide, maintain, and grow its proprietary PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) hardware and software at each customer location. The company also provides both local and off-site image archiving as part of its service delivery model, and if a customer experiences a data disaster, swift redeployment is guaranteed. Customer requests for additional capabilities are now quickly fulfilled, as well as all automatic hardware and software refreshes - ensuring that equipment stays current without extra fees or charges.

The device manufacturer now has total visibility into the status of its customers’ hardware infrastructure. They also have a better way to support it using Quest’s highly skilled support infrastructure that spans hundreds of field personnel at locations throughout the world. Quest’s responsiveness and transparency is its service and asset management tool, called QuestNet^TM, which streamlines tracking, reporting, and management functions. With QuestNet^TM, the manufacturer knows that all inventory information and support history is monitored and captured from a compliance standpoint. The manufacturer has real-time access to information about its devices, failures, what and where a failure occurs, what the fix was, and other analytics that can help it to better monitor its equipment infrastructure and improve optimization planning.