Customer Case

How Canon uses Data & AI to grow their business using Einstein Analytics

Canon Medical Systems Europe (hereafter CMSE) is a leading supplier of high-quality medical imaging equipment for a wide range of clinical specialties around the globe. With over 100 years of experience in medical imaging, CMSE has always stayed true to their Made for Life philosophy in which patients are at the heart of everything they do. One of the key pillars in this approach includes innovation, finding new ways to develop intelligent solutions. True innovation that meets the growing needs to be more efficient and achieve results fast with increased clinical confidence. This requires a data-driven approach and mindset. But how do you create and embed a data-driven way of working into your organisation?

Challenge

In order to secure its goal – to deliver optimum health opportunities for patients through uncompromised performance, comfort and safety features – CMSE has set a strategic objective to double digit sustainable and profitable growth. This requires a thorough understanding of the business environment, including customers’ needs and challenges and competition. Since the environment is changing rapidly, CMSE has to act fast with their data-driven way of working to provide customers the user experience they expect.

But Canon is dealing with common issues many companies are struggling with in the area of data analytics and AI. Stakeholders like to work in their own way, and often have their own systems and workflows, which makes there is no single source of truth. The challenge is to connect all various systems in a way that all stakeholders can work together in a data-driven manner, even though these stakeholders can have different information needs. This not only requires a different mindset, but involves a cultural change that should  be advocated by management and business users across all levels.

Solution

To achieve this, CMSE invoked Salesforce Einstein Analytics. Einstein Analytics combines dynamic and interactive data visualisation with the power of machine learning to deliver insights and data-driven applications for every business user. Together with Nextview, CMSE kicked off by gathering the requirements for the KPIs and figuring out needs of the end users. For this purpose, a design thinking workshop was organised, including brainstorming sessions with the Salesforce and Oracle team to define all the data sources. As one of the first steps to the personalised role-based dashboards, Nextview developed a prototype of the management dashboard. This dashboard was used to develop even more accurate KPIs and requirements, and was the cornerstone of the role-based dashboards.

Results
  1. All stakeholders are more aligned with and involved in the new strategy of Canon thanks to the implementation of Einstein Analytics
  2. The Sales Dashboard was the first step towards a data-driven approach and to the improvement of business analytics. It resulted in a KPI overview dashboard signaling metrics and trends, growth KPIs and profit KPIs.
  3. Dashboard are used now not only personally but also in the board and management meetings
  4. The data-driven approach adopted by Canon paved the way for more advanced AI solutions. This is what Canon considers as a next step, taking one step at the same time.