Blog 6 in the Business Growth series from MRN CEO, Dr. Graham Wylie
This will be the last blog in our business growth blog series, the story of how we’ve grown from 4 to 140 over the past 13 years and helped to deliver over 40,000 home trial support visits. In this blog, I am going to talk about our approach to what we ‘focus’ on. We believe in three key drivers that propel our business forward:
Innovation
Operational Excellence
Customer Centricity
Innovation is critical for us at MRN – it’s in our DNA. Ever since we started innovating in clinical trials in 2006 by enabling patients to be seen at their home, work or school, we continue to work hard to ensure we’re on the forefront of development in trials. We have an R&D function that is constantly looking at new ideas for services and capabilities that fuels our ability to improve the way clinical trials are run in the community. Our R&D group is formed of several full-time staff who create projects using agile methodology to co-ordinate experts across MRN to deliver well documented and thoughtful ways to enhance our services and ultimately, benefit our customers and patients.
Operational excellence is a foundation stone of our day-to-day. We constantly strive to create great processes to which we remain compliant – all of this is based on our Quality Management System. Our QMS helps us to regulate and improve our processes while ensuring we adhere to our SOPs. Our culture is one of constant upgrading of processes and our focus is to ensure they are technology-enabled through workflow.
Customer Centricity is about how we meet our customer’s expectations. We subscribe to the theory that doing a high-quality job is always the route to a customer’s heart. Our people are engaged and dedicated to doing a good job – personally, for the customer and for MRN. This shows through in the many plaudits we receive from customers, praising our staff. No complex clinical trial goes exactly to plan, so the relationships we build are critical to being able to react to circumstances, being flexible and collaborative to achieve the common goal of a good trial result.
To be theoretical for a moment – at MRN, customer centricity is based on some key objectives – Transparency, Reliability and Relevance. Relevance means our activities are correctly targeted at the problems the customers have – in our case this starts with improving recruitment and retention, focusing on the patient as a stakeholder (patient-centricity) and speeding up the trial. Reliability means our services behave the way the customer expects, and Transparency means our customers know what is going on – warts and all.
Of course, it would be ridiculous to suggest that MRN always get this right – we don’t. What we do want to do is always fix errors and learn. Our mistakes may frustrate us, but our solutions define us.