Bella Health care india

Should Bella Healthcare India take on Project TKO and develop an EKG specifically for the local market? Why or why not? TKO, “Technical Knockout”, is single channel EKG, Bella Healthcare India is planning to launch in Indian market. As per my opinion, Bella has many reasons to take up this opportunity. I will categorise these reasons in two broad categories, External and Internal factors. First external factor that affects decision of Bella to take TKO is large population of India with insufficient health care services. India’s population is large and growing but healthcare facilities are not growing with the same rate. Also most of the medical facilities of the country are concentrated in urban areas, leaving rural area with insufficient healthcare facilities. Unfortunately, most of the Indian population stays in small towns and villages. Another fact, in line with this, is availability of less no of physicians and specialists in the field of heart diseases. This has created room for medical services and devices sellers to expand their businesses in the country. The EKG global revenue chart shows that between 2010 and 2015, 9% – 12% of the global revenue will come from Asia-Pacific.

As one of the second highest population country in Asia-Pacific, India will definitely contribute major portion of the revenue. The figures in the chart substantiate the fact that Bella has good scope to expand its services in the country. Second factor that helps Bella to take go ahead decision for TKO is increased rate of heart diseases in the country. As per different epidemiological and angiographic studies, Indians are showing heart disease symptoms at young age and there are approximately 30 million CAD patients in the country. This number is expected to double by 2015. These patients will definitely need more and more medical check up and diagnosis facilities, that are not available at this point of time. This will give scope to Bella to capture the growing market. Third factor is raising awareness towards health that in turn increasing willingness of Indians to pay for medical services. Willingness is one of the critical factors in any market and in this case this factor is already in favour of medical industry and so of Bella healthcare. These favouring factors come with the great challenges, which Bella has to tackle. First challenge is competition with world class healthcare company GE, local company BPL health and few more Chinese and Korean companies. These companies have already captured considerable market.

But not all of them are providing complete solutions to suit Indian market. Primary need of the Indian market is cost effective medical instruments. Few companies are providing cheaper solutions but those solutions come without any warranty and post sale customer service. Bella has identified the challenge and need of providing cost effective complete solution to satisfy needs of Indian market and defined its product TKO with four design principles; profitability, affordability, ease-of-use and connectivity. Many of the Indian families fall in low income categories and health insurance facilities are not yet spread across the country, especially rural part of the country. Because of these factors Indians are more inclined towards cheaper medical facilities and so investors are inclined towards reasonable ROI. This justifies the profitability and affordability criteria of Bella’s TKO, which will help medical professionals to set up good ROI on its investment while providing affordable solution to the people. Limited number of physicians and specialists in the country can limit the use of TKO. Also concentration of population in small towns and villages, where transport facilities are not up to the mark, creates need of portable devices. To tackle these issues Bella has defined its third design principle of ‘ease-to-use’.

This will make TKO weight 2 Kg. or less and one touch operating device so that physicians could handle it with minimum training. Indian villages still face electricity issues and Bella is will provide solution to this problem by giving battery operated device. Bella is addressing issue of unavailability of trained physicians with its fourth design principle ‘connectivity’. This design feature will help physician to transmit data wirelessly to cardiac speciality centres and work with general practitioners to diagnose the issue. Thus these four design principles will help Bella to address all the key issues of heart disease diagnosis equipments. In addition to the new wireless data transfer feature, Bella’s design team is exploring the possibility of adding DICOM feature in TKO. Even though DICOM feature is not critical in near future, it will help Bella to differentiate its product from GE’s similar product and will give upper hand in marketing the device. Now, let’s concentrate on internal factors. Bella healthcare India, part of global organisation, has its own strengths, which will lead it to the successful handling of TKO. First strength of the company is its India head Joseph Cherian, who has handled initial set up of Bella India and successfully leaded the production of many devices, and Design head Jeremy Manning, who came from US with 10 years of rich experience in medical devices development and manufacturing.

Cherian has his own proven, tough and no-nonsense management style and he always keeps close eye on production schedules and product quality. These two leaders worked together before with Bella India team for successful delivery of Fiit X17 and so are aware of strengths, weaknesses and issues of Indian design and production teams. This awareness will help them to identify and tackle different issues. It will also help them to define strategy, which will suit to the Indian organisation. Most important, both the leaders are very confident about TKO and that will help them to lead the team to the success. Second factor is easy and ample availability of Indian engineering talent at affordable cost. This talent can be best utilised further with the product specific trainings. This makes replacement and expansion of the work force easy in difficult situations. Third factor, that makes Bella India more suitable for TKO, is its cultural and location proximity to the Indian market. This helps team to understand and address key needs of Indian market. Also, proximity will help to find low cost component suppliers and deal with them effectively. These elements will reduce cost of production, speed up the prototype and production process and in turn will reduce time to market. Fourth factor is already built and proven base of cost effective manufacturing of Bella India. This shows the experience of the unit in cost reduction techniques.

This experience further will help to reduce TKO development and production cost. This prediction of cost effectiveness can be substantiated by Exhibit 1, which depicts that design and production in India will reduce the production cost to approximately 55%. Also, even though TKO is new project for Bella India, its parent company in US has a single channel EKG product already marketed. This may help Indian team to get any last minute design assistance or make them aware of common problems the product will face. This will speed up their design and production process. Last and foremost important internal factor is experience of the Bella India’s team of many successful production deliveries and failure of project Baton. This not only helped team to realise its strength but also helped to understand its mistakes. Experience of Baton has already covered the learning curve of the team and that is one of key speeding factor to TKO. Bella Healthcare India will definitely face few issues during TKO production. One of the key issues is time to market, especially when companies such as GE, BPL are already in market. But the well equipped, talented, experienced team of Bella with its four design principles will handle all the issues and lead to the success.

Looking at the features Bella is incorporating in TKO; it is not providing EGK equipment but the complete solution for CAD diagnosis. If the team successfully completes this project and captures even 10% of the market for TKO, it will provide approximately $3 million business, over the period of approximately 7 years, to Bella Healthcare. If I move out of the boundaries of India and consider other developing countries, then the prospects for business are even higher as most of the developing countries have similar criteria for healthcare facilities and equipments.