Ambu: Building the foundation for transformation

Ambu is a global medical device company on a mission to improve patient safety and ultimately save lives. Founded in Denmark in 1937, they focus on single-use medical devices, such as endoscopes, face masks, resuscitators and electrodes.

Being single-use, Ambu’s medical devices improve the safety of medical environments and thus protect patients. With the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, Ambu’s products play a central role in fighting against patient cross-contamination and ensuring the safety of staff and patients alike.

Ambu has grown significantly in recent years but their legacy digital infrastructure was slowing them down. With a global mission to save lives, the company needed a CRM solution to match.

Outdated digital infrastructure

Ambu’s sales operate globally. The sales reps are constantly on the go, engaging with healthcare professionals in and out of hospitals.

“If you turn back time a bit over a year we were at a crucial stage of our growth journey: entering a new market, endoscopy, and ramping up our innovation and product development. But then we got caught in our digital infrastructure,” describes Thomas Ulrik Lund, who works as Commercial Digital Transformation Director at Ambu.

The sales team used an old CRM system that didn’t offer great user experience or other essential modern features. New sales reps coming from companies using modern digital platforms highlighted Ambu’s need even more.

“The old digital platform had done its job many years ago. It wasn’t user-friendly for our sales reps and they only used it when forced. As the platform greatly influences the daily life of a sales rep, we needed to do something really quickly,” Lund continues.

Speed is paramount

To move fast, Ambu took Salesforce almost entirely out-of-the-box, using declarative development to do configurations and no code when possible. They also chose Fluido, a specialist Salesforce company known for their agile approach, as their consultant for implementing the system.

“Time-to-launch was a key priority for the project. We took what was on the old platform and lifted it to the new platform. We also picked low hanging fruit like optimizing some of the processes and tightened back-end integration. But the majority of the work on optimizing processes was pushed to after the initial launch,” Lund describes the approach.

To gain a holistic view to the customer, the project touched upon Salesforce’s account and activity management, lead and opportunity management, sales reporting and analytics. Integrations to MDM, marketing automation, data warehouse and analytics systems were also implemented.

Ambu rolled Salesforce out first in the US and then in EMEA. A few regional tweaks to the sales processes were made but global templates were utilized to a very large extent.

Lund thanks Fluido’s flexibility during the project.

“Fluido was also able to adjust resources according to the project’s needs.”

Another key criteria was user adoption.

“It takes a lot of effort to drive user adoption. Together with Fluido we planned the setup for training: first for the super users, who in turn trained the rest of the organization. We were really happy with Fluido’s training expertise and how they navigated our stakeholder community; this is where Fluido really excelled.”

It’s all about execution

Ambu’s Salesforce implementation was rolled out with extraordinary speed: in 14 weeks at the end of 2020 for 500 users in the US, and again in 14 weeks for another 500 users in EMEA and Australia at the beginning of 2021. In under a year since starting to think about the transformation, Ambu now has a live platform in use.

“I haven’t heard anyone doing this in eight months,” Lund says with a smile.

He continues: “What many companies underestimate is time. You might have an amazing business case but then you spend 2–3 years implementing it. I think execution is king: if you don’t execute you don’t get any value. So time-to-market really is the key.”

Ambu’s Salesforce user adoption is also on a good track: 85 percent of users had logged in within two weeks after going live. Also, 50 percent of users have started using activities in Salesforce.

“We are off to a good start, but we are only in the beginning of using the platform and user adoption needs to remain a constant focus area,” Lund acknowledges.

Ambu’s Salesforce project was all about laying the foundation for future transformation. They see the modern platform as a strategic asset enabling them to develop word-class sales, marketing and service operations.

Lund is happy with their partnership with Fluido:

“Fluido has a healthy culture that enables a partnership approach for the project: we worked together without the boundaries of two separate companies. It shows the mindset that you have about working with the clients. It also comes back to the good leadership and empathetic culture of Fluido. You try to put yourselves in our shoes,” Lund evaluates.

He concludes: “Overall, I felt there was a strong sense of responsibility on the delivery on Fluido’s side. I think you can really sense that both from the project members’ and management’s side.”

Written by Mirka Kurkela