Bioventus Bioness Integration Update – May 27 Operations, Quality and Order-to-Cash

by Sarah Caley

The last couple of weeks have been busy here in Valencia with a number of Integration workstreams ongoing. Last week Miguel Beltran-Delgado’s Operations and Quality teams gathered for three days to review Bioness’ Operations roadmap. The goal was to better understand the processes from procurement, through manufacturing to shipment.

The combined team took a deeper dive in critical suppliers and the supply chain network of Bioness. Learning about the challenges and opportunities of the sourcing strategy and increased purchasing power of the combined company that will benefit the full potential plan. On the quality side, the full team had the opportunity to get better acquainted and began identifying areas of collaboration that make the most sense for the business. Examples of this included discussions of future transition to an electronic document system such as the one currently used in the Memphis office and transition of the Bioness paper system into this. Other areas of focus included complaint handling, product technical support and training processes.  The overall goal was to identify “best in class” processes and looking to build an integration plan that makes use of these capabilities from both organizations.

Representing the Order-to-Cash team, Sean Hagarty, Adrianne Brown and Kimberly Miller were onsite working side-by-side with Rita Shteinman’s Client Relations Department.  This week was very busy being the last week of the month, and so the team took the opportunity to “shadow” a number of the Bioness team members to fully understand the complexities and challenges of closing out the month.

Sean Hagarty said “the Bioness employees I spoke with were all very passionate about how their products help improve the lives of their patients and it’s that core value that drives their focus on helping each and every patient that they can.”

This team does impressive work and are strong patient advocates – they work hard to get Bioness devices into the hands of patients who desperately want to improve their activity and function. This can be challenging when insurance companies frequently don’t cover some of the products, but this team goes to bat.

Kim reported that one customer yesterday was informed that her L300 product was finally going to be covered and the patient cried on the phone in gratitude for the help and work the Bioness team put in to get the product paid for – what an impact for that patient and for our company!

Lastly, the Integration team wanted to thank the Bioness employees for their responsiveness to the integration survey we sent out.  We had 89 total responses, and are currently reviewing the results. We will report back with highlights of the findings as well as steps we will take to try to address any of the areas for improvement raised by Bioness employees.