case studY: Medical System Installations


Mevion Medical Systems manufactures and installs proton therapy devices for cancer treatment centers worldwide.

INTERVIEW WITH

Curt Kienast
VP, Global Service

Software Development Group
& Global Service Team

“If you’re shopping for a tool to set up a Scrum workflow in Salesforce, you’ll be impressed with what TaskRay can do.”

Why did you choose TaskRay?

At Mevion, our service team uses Salesforce to manage our accounts and communicate with our customers about installations. But, as the lead for the team in charge of the installations themselves, I found myself with a tool—Salesforce—that did nothing for us in terms of project management. (As a software engineer and Scrum believer, I had used Jira so I was accustomed to a very robust tool.)

We needed to build a repeatable process that we could track, so our IT manager started searching for solutions and found TaskRay. To test it, he downloaded the demo, set up a Scrum board, and created an installation project template. TaskRay seemed to have the functionalities and features we needed (and was customizable to meet our needs), so we signed on.

The fact that TaskRay is Salesforce native was key. And we liked that TaskRay was designed with an agile process in mind—it felt familiar and was the closest tool to Jira we could find. It was also the most mature of the Salesforce-native project management tools available.

How are you using TaskRay?

There are over 500 procedures required to install one of our devices, which makes having a strong project management tool a necessity. Using TaskRay, we set up each procedure in a Agile/Scrum-based fashion.

The complexity of our installation process is compounded by the fact that we have ERP/MRP systems with important data that need to talk to our project management solution. With TaskRay, we can automatically bring in part numbers and work instructions.

To make things even more interesting, each of our devices is a single asset made up of several hundred objects. TaskRay allows us to tie the critical information about the individual objects into one system and associate them with the correct parent asset.

Within a year of our installation team adopting TaskRay, people in the factory got curious about what we were up to. (Back then, they were using a whiteboard to track part building process and putting the information on a shared drive where it was, to state the obvious, a little hard to find.) We convinced the factory team that TaskRay could not only make their production process better, it could also help integrate production with installation, so they signed on as well.

Today, Mevion is using TaskRay to manage our production, installation, and service processes.

  • Installation issues invariably arise so we use TaskRay’s Chatter feature to get instant feedback and then set up a task to document the problem, who worked on it, and how we solved it. And we use sub-projects to help us track deviations from normal installation protocol. All of this is critical because we need to document everything for regulatory purposes.
  • Our service group uses TaskRay to track changes engineering wants to make after a device has been installed. We also use automation in TaskRay to create tasks for when an upgrade or repair needs to happen.
  • We rely heavily on TaskRay’s template feature. For example, when a device gets built and assigned a serial number we clone the project for the next device. That way, all learnings from the first project are brought forward automatically.
  • We’re using the Community portal to allow our customers to access records related to their device, installation, service, etc. (they can only see the data we want to share). This is a huge help.

How has TaskRay benefited your team?

No one in our company thought an agile process would work in a non-development environment. But in less than two years, we reduced our installation time from two and a half years to nine months. A large portion of the time savings was related to our use of TaskRay to define our process and escalate issues.

 

Any other reasons you like TaskRay?

  • If you want to do agile-style project management, you must facilitate the process with a tool that allows you to set priorities and see impediments (which Gantt-based tools simply don’t do). TaskRay does this and more.
  • Because TaskRay is easy to customize, installation is straightforward. (We worked with a single integration consultant to get our system up and running.)
  • Salesforce is really just a platform for development, so anything you can imagine can be built in it. This is why using Salesforce in the medical world is a huge advantage—it allows you to integrate data with other parts of your organization and other outside data sources, even at the enterprise level. And together with TaskRay, there are endless ways to leverage this data to improve your processes.
  • I really appreciate the fact that the TaskRay team treats me as a partner—we have an open dialogue with the team about new features and improvements. This seems to be a core value for them and it makes a big difference.

Any other reasons you like TaskRay?

  • If you want to do agile-style project management, you must facilitate the process with a tool that allows you to set priorities and see impediments (which Gantt-based tools simply don’t do). TaskRay does this and more.

  • Because TaskRay is easy to customize, installation is straightforward. (We worked with a single integration consultant to get our system up and running.)

  • Salesforce is really just a platform for development, so anything you can imagine can be built in it. This is why using Salesforce in the medical world is a huge advantage—it allows you to integrate data with other parts of your organization and other outside data sources, even at the enterprise level. And together with TaskRay, there are endless ways to leverage this data to improve your processes

 

“I really appreciate the fact that the TaskRay team treats me as a partner—we have an open dialogue with the team about new features and improvements. This seems to be a core value for them and it makes a big difference.”


 

Learn more about TaskRay

To find out more about TaskRay, reach out to your account executive or schedule time with one at your convenience.