The key to a successful partnership between Linte and Siemens Healthineers

The year was 2008 and Gabriela Serafim was in her final year of Computer Science at USP in São Carlos when she landed an internship at the Siemens Group. Little did she know that, 10 years later, she would take on the role of IT Business Relationship Manager, the position she holds to this day.

Over the years, Gabriela worked in project management and business analysis until she reached the Business Partner area. Along that successful path, she got to know the processes of many different areas and came across a few scenarios that could be optimized.

Early 2019 marked the beginning of the relationship between Siemens Healthineers and Linte, whose first contact happened during a visit to Cubo Itaú, where Linte was based. “At one point we needed to automate part of our process, and that is when our conversations intensified”, Gabriela recalls.

Among the main figures that show the results of the Linte and Siemens Healthineers partnership, we highlight a few below:

• +400 active users on Linte.
• +6 thousand requests and contracts in progress on Linte.
• Teams in 7 countries use Linte: Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Costa Rica, Argentina and Uruguay.

The problems the Siemens Healthineers team needed to solve

As project lead, Gabriela was responsible for coordinating the interested areas and drawing a plan to understand which of the difficulties they faced could be solved by Linte.

Our main need was centralizing and automating the process. We did not have full control over all the information. Tracking was done through emails and messages, there was no workflow with owners and dates.

Gabriela says that before the Linte rollout, contracts reached the team from legal and each analyst worked on the document on their own machine, with no specific tool. “If a clause came up that we needed approval for, for example, that was handled by the analyst on their computer, and we had no way to track how long it took”, she recalls.

The first benefits Linte brought to the team

Shortly after Linte went live, Gabriela started noticing the first advantages of having software to organize the process and bring more transparency to it. The clearest benefit right away was time: with Linte it became possible to see how much was spent at each stage, and even to extract data and consequently suggest improvements.

That delay may come from a series of other factors that need to be addressed, something behavioral, something we could explore and that was not visible before because we did not have this kind of tracking done properly through a tool.

Another point Gabriela stressed was the centralization of information, something fundamental especially in large companies with processes that involve more than one area, as is the case at Siemens Healthineers. “Everything related to contracts is inside Linte”, she says. “If you need any documentation, including what was handled by email, it stays in the tab where we can upload information, you have a folder structure that is easy to navigate and you do not have to go looking in different places”, she adds.

The hypothetical scenario without a tool like Linte

Imagining a context in which Siemens Healthineers did not have the support of a tool like Linte, Gabriela says that not only her team but other teams that are part of the company’s process would be stuck. “We would still have problems with non-compliance costs, with slow responses and slow quotes for the sales team, slow contract generation to send to a client...”, she lists.

We would still be stagnant on centralizing and automating the process, given that digitalization has come on strong lately, especially during the pandemic. What Linte does today with the workflow, we used to do in person, we would walk up to someone’s desk, and that was not possible during the pandemic. So I understand the damage would have been greater.

The secret behind the trust between the companies

Asked what she values most in the partnership, Gabriela does not miss the chance to praise the transparent, trusting relationship we managed to build between the companies. “Just as Linte commits to delivering what we ask for, we also commit to collaborating and providing what is needed”, she says.

I really enjoy working with Linte because of that: it is a very beneficial relationship, we have a great exchange. Over these years there were many obstacles, many of which we overcame, some we are still facing, but there is never a door closed right away, it is always “I will try to help you as far as I can”, and that is really nice.

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