Dustin Johnson of Avanos Medical is one of many expert presenters participating in the upcoming Q1 Productions Life Science Digital Transformation Conference. Preview topics, including ROI and technology vendor relationships, he will cover at the event.

 

Can you please give a description of your job title and what that entails?

 

I am the Global Customer Experience Portfolio IT Leader at Avanos Medical. My team oversees all technologies that support our customers and customer facing teams. This includes digital/product marketing, sales, customer service, commercial operations, as well as all analytic systems for the company. I joined five years ago to help with the separation of the organization as its own public company, from being the healthcare division at Kimberly Clark in 2014.

 

Can you give examples of approaches you’ve used to determine ROI metrics and methods for determining success?

 

When Avanos divested its Surgical and Infection Prevention Division in 2018, it sold all of its IT systems in order to transform the business into a pure-play medical device manufacturer. We took that opportunity to build a new cloud-based global system that would not only reduce ongoing costs for the organization, but also enable us to better understand our customers on a global basis. Since we only had eighteen months to replace all of our systems, we had to be laser focused on what success looked like for this transformation. The primary goal was as little business disruption as possible to make it seamless to our customers. As we got closer to the go-live we had each business team present their current KPIs they use to manage business operations and the range (best case/worst case) of where they think we would be during the post go-live stabilization phase of the separation activities. Examples would include customer’s average call wait times, average time to process returns, on-time ship metrics, dollars in backorders, etc. This exercise was critical to help the executives understand our risk-exposure range, where we should focus our efforts and also help with a definition of moving from a stabilization phase to a “back to normal operations” or “back to a new improved normal” as we had aspirations that our end-state would have improved our ability to have operational excellence.

 

What are the main takeaways you hope attendees learn from the panel on “Optimizing Digital Transformation via Strategic Partnership with Technology Vendors”?

 

• Your partner understands AND DEMONSTRATES their understanding of your industry at the business process level
• Demonstrate ability to bridge the program strategy to execution
• Implementation contract has financial implications (positive and negative) that are aligned to your objectives

 

Why do you think life science professionals should attend the conference?

 

Look at the technology that supported the industry 10-15 years ago compared to now. Knowing that rate of change, and that the rate of technology change is accelerating, where do you think we will be 5-10 years from now? How do you ensure you make the correct strategic investments, hire the right talent, know where and when to pivot? The best way to do that is to have in-depth conversations with peers.

 

Save your spot for the upcoming Digital Transformation Conference to benchmark KPIs, optimization and much more with industry and legal experts.

 

Q1Web Admin is a Content Marketing Associate for Q1 Productions, where she is responsible for campaign planning, content development and executing marketing projects for the life sciences, pharmaceutical and food and beverage industries.