Case Studies: Stryker Endoscopy

The Challenge

Stryker provides support for hundreds of different medical devices in hospitals. Their technical support team boasted a great deal of knowledge about the different products, but did not have any system in place to document or collate that knowledge.

The Solution

Online Vitality partnered with Stryker to develop a community-based knowledge management system for trouble ticket support tracking. This system would be an organic, constantly growing and modifying series of documents, comments, thoughts, and other tidbits of information that would be captured and identified during support calls. The goal of the system was to eventually create a single, centralized, user-driven repository of technical support information for their product line that was consolidated in a few key documents.

Online Vitality spent several days sitting alongside the technical support team to learn how they currently do business. We were able to monitor calls and document their current review and support process. Members of the technical support staff also staged “training calls” to demonstrate uncommon or unusual calls that sometimes come into the system. This kind of partnership gave us a greater understanding of how they operate and how a centralized knowledge management system could benefit everyone.

Although this was originally planned as a tool for internal use only, Stryker knew that, one day, they may want to make this information available on the web to partners and perhaps the general public. We worked carefully with technical support leaders as well as the product marketing team to identify different types of information that would be considered internal-use only, partner-use only, and general available information. These various levels of access needed to be carefully placed throughout the system so that, as the system grew, the data would be ready for future phases of the project.