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▉ The challenge

A global manufacturing leader was struggling to accelerate worldwide production in an industry plagued by supply chain challenges and rapid advances in AI and other technologies. The manufacturing leader tapped the EY team to help reboot their approach to operations and fast track an even brighter future.

▉ The breakthrough

The implemented improvements to date have already yielded significant time savings of 20% to 30%, enabling the rationalization of the company’s entire global plant footprint. To spearhead this joint initiative, an EY product manager and architect were assigned, bringing their expertise and managerial skills to bear on the tasks at hand. Critical to the success of this collaboration was conducting scenario and root cause analysis, which allowed us to better understand the variables influencing the product and enabled us to devise more targeted strategies. Furthermore, as part of our innovative approach, we employed Microsoft Azure to test the proof of concept for product formulation changes. This allowed us to simulate and evaluate potential changes without overcommitting resources, ensuring that the chosen strategy was validated before implementation.

▉ The results

The recent improvements implemented have generated notable efficiency, delivering time savings of 20%-30%. This has revolutionized the company's global plant operations while also providing human resources advantages. With Azure's capabilities and EY's process guidance, data scientists have taken on roles previously reserved for dedicated data and ML engineers, further contributing to productivity. These enhancements have expedited the realization of the company's digital strategy, setting a pace for future triumphs. Projected savings due to these changes are estimated at $50 million across their worldwide operations. Moreover, the EY team’s successful initial phase led to our engagement in an additional project aimed at improving manufacturing quality, utilizing AI and physics data sets for significant outcome improvements such as 50% time reduction in achieving optimal manufacturing material mix and color specifications. Currently, the program is being expanded using Azure's ML ops for full-scale data management. Plans to replicate this success in other plants are progressing.

▉ The challenge

A prestigious nonprofit hospital wanted to improve its insights into the disparities in patient care. EY health analytics teams worked to securely and effectively address the client’s challenges in the following two projects.

The first project was part of the client’s long-term, multimillion-dollar racial equity effort that sought to leverage analytics to identify racial gaps and address health care inequity. The second project supported a population health and value-based care program. 

In both projects, the client engaged with EY teams because it needed to transition from its previous model of manual data processes to a more automated, cloud-based system. Without a cloud-based platform for data, health care workers had to complete laborious manual data input and did not have easy data access to inform patient care.

▉ The breakthrough

The EY team compared Microsoft technologies and built a case for which technologies would best suit the client’s needs. In the first project, the team developed cloud-based processes that included trusted data collection, reporting, dashboard creation, query optimization, and driver analyses using methodologies such as regression, decision trees, clustering, and patient journey mining.

In the second project, EY risk-capturing analysis helped the hospital on a larger scale by creating dashboards to show leadership how the entire organization was performing. On a smaller scale, the team tested the analysis on a beta level with a small number of patients and providers as a new intervention.

▉ The results

For the racial equity project, the EY teams observed more than 100 patient history factors of 30,000 patients with chronic kidney disease to develop intervention programs that would encourage more patients to see a nephrologist regularly.  

Throughout the second project, the EY teams analyzed 50 factors that contributed to whether patients felt respected by their health care team. This analysis identified departments and demographics associated with low scores, and this data was leveraged to improve the quality of care and patient satisfaction levels.

Both projects helped enable the client to have greater access to data as well as allow for scalability in future applications. By having more accessible data, health care providers can gain more insights about their patients, and ultimately, improve patient outcomes.