Balt uses Smartsheet to streamline internal processes in its dedication to the treatment of neurovascular diseases

Shortly after its founding in France in 1977, Balt Group introduced one of the world’s first neurovascular intervention devices. Forty-six years later, Balt has grown into a global medical equipment manufacturer with 700 employees in 10 countries. The company now collaborates closely with physicians and healthcare institutions to develop medical devices to treat stroke and other neurovascular diseases. 

As the company continued to grow, the IT team needed to more quickly build and roll out solutions to support that growth. “We need to deliver our products in a timely manner to help people treat their conditions, so it's very important for us to set up internal solutions to support that. That’s also how we stay an innovation leader,” says Kheng Ang, IT director for global operations, Balt. The company’s existing enterprise systems, including an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, lacked the agility IT required. “It was very time-consuming to make changes in the ERP system, and it wasn’t user-friendly,” Ang says. 

Balt’s internal systems were also not well-suited for collaboration. “We have a disparate group of manufacturing, distribution, and sales offices around the world, and everyone relied on spreadsheets and email to communicate about projects. We wanted to provide more consistency in processes,” says Ang.

Creating Requisition Approval and IT Ticketing Apps in Smartsheet

Ang and his team began using Smartsheet in 2021, initially for project management. “We started using Smartsheet to streamline projects and improve collaboration,” he says. “Eventually, we started building solutions in Smartsheet, and we rolled out a power user program.” The IT team then created its own internal Smartsheet Center of Excellence, building solutions for different departments and bringing Smartsheet into the company’s enterprise system portfolio. “We’re almost like the company’s software provider now, and Smartsheet is our main tool,” says Ang.

One of the first company-wide solutions Balt created in Smartsheet was a PO requisition system to manage internal purchase requests for everything from raw manufacturing materials to employee laptops. “Previously, purchase requests were approved over email or spreadsheet forms. The process only supported two approvers, and we needed to support increase that as more departments started using it,” says Ang. 

Balt built a new requisition system using automated workflows in Smartsheet. The system supports up to eight approvers and automatically determines which approver to send a purchase request form to. “Now, the process gets a proper review and approval by the right teams, and it also goes into our ERP system so finance can track it and ensure everything is paid on time,” says Ang. “We first started using the new system in the US, and we rolled it out globally after getting some feedback from other teams.” The requisition solution relies on Smartsheet document generator to automatically produce PDFs of approved requisitions, including digital approver signatures, which then become purchase orders.

Balt also used Smartsheeet WorkApps to quickly integrate an IT ticketing app with Smartsheet so IT staff can use one location to manage IT support tickets or look up information in the company’s knowledge base.

“We didn’t have a good enough, user-friendly IT ticketing platform, and Smartsheet changed that for us,” says Ang.

Ang also created an ERP dashboard that displays estimated waiting time for tickets, so internal users know when to expect their ticket to be addressed. Currently, the IT team receives 170 support tickets monthly through the app. 

Most recently, the Balt IT team used Smartsheet to build a solution for human resources, which streamlines the employee onboarding and offboarding process.

A Simplified Way to Build Business Solutions

Balt relied on Smartsheet’s ease of use to create and deploy its requisition system and IT ticketing app. “Smartsheet is very user-friendly, and it gives us a platform for quickly building out solutions for our company,” says Ang. “It’s a low-code tool that makes it easy to build, even if you’re not a software engineer. As an example, a junior analyst on my team with basically no development experience built a project for me within a month, with no issues at all.”

Smartsheet is also simple to use for Balt business leaders, who use Smartsheet dashboards to quickly review and approve purchase requisitions. “The purchase requisition tool needed to be user-friendly enough that that our chief executives can use it effectively. This is something that they can easily do on their mobile devices,” Ang says.

45% of Requisitions Approved in a Day

Using its new Smartsheet purchase requisition solution, Balt is able to approve 45% of its requisitions within one business day and nearly 100% within five business days. “Approving requisitions faster in Smartsheet means the business moves faster, and we can ultimately get our products completed and out to customers on time,” says Ang.

“Before, we used paper and email and had no metrics to track how efficient we were in this process. Now, we’re much more efficient, despite the fact that we now have up to eight approvers instead of just two. This also means our purchasing team no longer needs to waste time chasing down approvals.”

Automated workflows in Smartsheet have also improved collaboration between geographically dispersed Balt staff. “Smartsheet is an amazing collaboration tool that lets us automate processes across the globe,” says Ang. “Employees from various teams previously had to try and work together via email or chat applications, but now they can work in our Smartsheet solutions and easily complete tasks, with alerts automatically notifying someone if a tasks isn’t completed by a certain date.”

Scalability to Meet Growth

Balt is currently expanding globally and is looking for quick and innovative ways to improve internal processes. The company is confident Smartsheet can support those plans.

“I don’t have to worry about solutions we build in Smartsheet. If I start with one user and need to quickly grow to hundreds of users, I know this solution can scale to and grow with us,” says Ang.

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