September 30, 2024

Medical Device Manufacturer Improves Customer Service and Supercharges Sales Team with Intuitive Data Dashboard

Koru Medical Systems develops and manufactures home and specialty infusion systems. With over 40 years of experience and $25 million in annual revenue, Koru’s small team takes pride in bringing to market safe and affordable healthcare products that change lives for the better.

Koru’s systems generate a great deal of data, which has for years been housed in a single tracings spreadsheet. As the lines of entries swelled to over 350,000, the spreadsheet became increasingly unwieldy.

An officer of the company, having previously engaged Stratus to solve a similar issue at a different organization, brought the team in at Koru to analyze the situation and find a way to break free from the file.

The Challenge: Inconsistent Data in a Mammoth File

This massive spreadsheet was notorious with both the sales and finance teams at Koru. “​​It was getting cumbersome to the point that it was a joke within the company. You’d see the circle dialing and dialing because it just couldn’t handle the amount of data that we needed to get out of it,” says Rob Cannon, Vice President of Sales.

There were several problems beyond the sheer size of the file:

  • Manual updating. Data ingestion required a financial analyst to pull reports and manually clean and prepare them before adding the data to the spreadsheet, a time-consuming and laborious process that left room for error.
  • Forecasting woes. Because of the difficulty of manipulating the file, sales forecasting took weeks of labor on the part of the finance team and hours of interviews of sales leadership to complete. Even after the process was complete, a lot of questions remained unanswered because of the limitations of the analysis possible in the spreadsheet environment.
  • Sales team hindered, finance team stretched. Sales people were not able to pull the regular reports they needed without the help of the finance team, and often received reports with little time to review the data before presenting it due to the intense and time-consuming effort required to extract insights from the file. Sales was also unable to answer client questions about accounts in real time because of the clunky manipulations required to pull actionable information from the spreadsheet and the lag time experienced while working with the spreadsheet.
  • Lack of fine-grained visibility. Many of Koru’s major clients consist of a number of sub-accounts. The data available in the spreadsheet made it impossible  to drill down into these “child accounts,” obscuring issues at that level. It was also challenging to jointly  analyze sales by product subcategories.
  • Data quality issues. At times, the finance team found inconsistencies in the spreadsheet data, calling into question the reliability of analyses based on spreadsheet manipulations.

Both the finance team and the sales team knew what they wanted to know, but figuring it out was a struggle with little payoff. “I’ve been crying for this kind of data for ten years,” says Alicia Smith, a senior account executive who has been with Koru since 2011.

“We’re having fewer meetings and quicker results. If I had four meetings for forecasting before, I now have two or three. Thanks to improved visibility and a clear understanding of sales trends, the company expects to unlock an estimated $5.2M in additional revenue in 2024.”
– Brian Rafferty, Senior Financial Planning and Analysis Manager

Solution: A Dashboard with a View

The first step to resolving Koru’s spreadsheet woes was a full audit by Stratus Data. Stratus explored the U.S. sales data set in order to establish ground truth about what data was available and how it was being processed and handled.

One immediate benefit of an audit is the creation of feedback loops that improve data quality. “The information we find in the audit allows them to refine their processes and results in everybody getting better data,” says Charles Pensig, Stratus Founding Partner, who led the audit.

The second step was making sense of the improved data in order to make recommendations for a key account strategy. In this step, Stratus built a dashboard that could handle the spreadsheet data without gumming up Koru’s operating systems.

Besides easily handling the data that had nearly locked up a 140-megabyte spreadsheet, the dashboard allows users to drill down into the sub-accounts and product subcategories to get a better view of what is happening at every level.

“When I came to Koru, trying to figure out what was going on in this spreadsheet was impossible. You couldn’t quickly look at last year, this year, month to month, and ask what’s going on, where are we hitting? Where are we missing?” says JC Speer, a regional account manager who joined the company in the spring of 2023. “And now, I can do it at clicks of a button.”

Results: Sales Enabled, Clients Served, and a Relationship Formed

The initial dashboard was only a starting point. In the weeks and months that followed, Stratus continued to speak with stakeholders at all levels of Koru’s operation, soliciting feedback and building out additional features to draw the most value out of the company’s data.

Some of the features added to the dashboard include:

  • Self-serve automation that allows for streamlined data ingestion, with formatting and cleansing functions built in.
  • Data visualization tools that make it easy to spot outliers and identify problems at the earliest stages.
  • Specialized views that simplify sales team reporting to clients and finance team reporting to the board of directors.

For the first time, everyone at Koru can rapidly explore sales data and put that data to work. The sales team, in particular, has been able to grow their roles and take initiative in ways that they could not before.

“We’re having fewer meetings and quicker results,” says Brian Rafferty, Koru’s senior financial planning and analysis manager. “If I had four meetings for forecasting before, I now have two or three.” Thanks to improved visibility and a clear understanding of sales trends, the company expects to unlock an estimated $5.2M in additional revenue in 2024.

Stratus Data continues to hold weekly office hours and one-on-ones with Koru to evolve the dashboard.

“I design new features of the dashboard with those conversations in mind,” says Kate Coppess, a data scientist at Stratus. “We’ve made information accessible in a way it wasn’t before.”

Real-time analysis, real-time results

After one of Koru’s key clients, a healthcare system operator, suffered a cyber attack in February of 2024, the Koru team’s newfound ability to conduct real-time data analysis allowed for the identification of an undiagnosed ordering and distribution issue that resulted in a $291k shortfall in expected spend. The client was able to correct their order using the sub account information Koru provided.

Another client, a healthcare product distributor, realized their numbers were off target thanks to Koru’s analysis and doubled their orders, spending $300k and helping ensure patients had the products they needed to manage their health conditions.

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