Propel Briefing Note
By: Daniel R. Matlis
Axendia was recently briefed by the Executive Management team at Propel following the launch of their Healthcare Manufacturer Community. Propel is offering its technology and supplier community to accelerate the production of ventilators based on Medtronic’s PB560 open source design. Visit Propel’s Healthcare Manufacturer Community for additional details.
Founded in 2015, and headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, Propel provides a cloud-based product success platform that connects the people, systems and processes needed to deliver products from concept to customer.
Entirely built on Salesforce’s modern cloud, multi-tenant cloud SaaS architecture, Propel allows organizations to take advantage of a modern cloud native product success management solution.
“Propel was founded with the knowledge that a single platform for all product needs allows for greater collaboration, faster decision making and easy deployment. Building on Salesforce allows us to easily integrate the customer and product records on a single platform,” said Ray Hein, CEO & Co-founder.
Product Success Platform
Propel provides a “product success platform” by combining Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Quality Management System (QMS) and Commercialization functionality in a single solution. Through this approach, Propel enables collaboration between product development, commercial, and service teams. This solution supports unified visibility throughout the product lifecycle by providing a single platform with the capabilities to manage all data in one place. “Product success is a team sport,” said Hein. “With Propel, the entire company can easily collaborate to create, commercialize and correct products using a single solution.”
Spanning product ideation, design, manufacturing, quality, field service and post market surveillance, the product success platform supports collaboration across the value chain to speed time to market from concept to patient.
Because Propel is built on the Salesforce platform, the solution incorporates its modern cloud capabilities including security, scalability, flexibility, configurability, usability, extensibility, analytics, and reporting. It also provides native capabilities for mobility, social media, artificial intelligence and machine learning as well as be ready for future technologies on a platform that can scale for companies of all sizes.
Propel’s solution helps medical device manufacturers move their product records to the cloud and supports service based integrations with systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Manufacturing Execution System (MES) and Supply Chain Management (SCM).
Propel also supports digital adverse event reporting through FDA’s Electronic Submission Gateway (ESG). Using these capabilities, Medical Device manufacturers can use Propel to create, submit and audit MedWatch 3500A submissions directly to the ESG. In addition submission information is fully integrated with the product and quality capabilities, improving accuracy while streamlining the entire process.
Customer Testimonials
Formlabs provides professional 3D printers for engineers, designers, manufacturers around the globe with the goal of allowing anyone to make anything. However, rapid growth coupled with disparate systems was decreasing efficiency and slowing time to market.
The company implemented Propel’s PLM and QMS with Salesforce’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Service Cloud to enable a single source of truth for part and Bill of Material (BOM) information. This solution also provided global access control for suppliers as well as the ability to spot and resolve issues sooner.
“With Propel, Formlabs was able to onboard and train new users quickly, configure their implementation to reduce time to market, and manage their global supply chain remotely,” said Dario Ambrosini, Chief Marketing Office at Propel.
“With Propel, we saw immediate benefits in eliminating human error and getting faster turnaround with our next prototype.” Daniel Snow, Chief Information Officer at Formlabs
When Advance Sterilization Product Services Inc. (ASP) was acquired by Fortive from Johnson and Johnson, they needed to set up their own systems within one year. In addition, they wanted to consolidate 12 different quality applications to simplify and accelerate business processes.
To support this effort, ASP implemented Propel’s PLM and QMS offerings as well as Digital FDA Medwatch Form 3500 submissions. In addition to Propel, ASP deployed Salesforce for CRM and SAP for ERP. All three solutions are integrated to ensure a comprehensive view of customer, product and supplier information.
“We needed a solution that could adapt to us versus us adapting to them. With Propel, we can completely mistake-proof our process. Propel’s Digital FDA Submissions enables incredible insight intelligence and ensures compliance for our business,” said Brent Lewis, Director, Enterprise IT Quality and Compliance Systems Advanced Sterilization Products Services Inc.
In Brief
PLM was originally designed to manage CAD drawings and bills of material. As these systems matured, it took significant effort to change the design-centric view to a product-centric one.
Propel offers a “product success platform” solution by combining PLM, QMS, and Commercialization functionality in a complete package. Through this approach, Propel enables collaboration between product development, commercial, and service teams.
As Life-Science companies become increasingly “Cloud-Comfortable,” we expect that cloud based platforms will become mainstream with the availability of integrated modern cloud solutions. These modern platforms will enable Life-Science companies to support collaboration across the value chain and speed time to market from concept to patient.
We will continue to monitor the Propel’s product success platform and provide periodic updates.