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Bella Health Care India

Should Bella Healthcare India take on Project TKO and develop an EKG specifically
for the local market? Why or why not?
TKO, Technical Knockout, is single channel EKG, Bella Healthcare India is
planning to launch in Indian market. As per my opinion, Bella has many reasons to
take up this opportunity. I will categorise these reasons in two broad categories,
External and Internal factors.
First external factor that affects decision of Bella to take TKO is large population of
India with insufficient health care services. Indias population is large and growing
but healthcare facilities are not growing with the same rate. Also most of the medical
facilities of the country are concentrated in urban areas, leaving rural area with
insufficient healthcare facilities. Unfortunately, most of the Indian population stays in
small towns and villages. Another fact, in line with this, is availability of less no of
physicians and specialists in the field of heart diseases. This has created room for
medical services and devices sellers to expand their businesses in the country. The
EKG global revenue chart shows that between 2010 and 2015, 9% 12% of the
global revenue will come from Asia-Pacific. As one of the second highest population
country in Asia-Pacific, India will definitely contribute major portion of the revenue.
The figures in the chart substantiate the fact that Bella has good scope to expand its
services in the country.
Second factor that helps Bella to take go ahead decision for TKO is increased rate of
heart diseases in the country. As per different epidemiological and angiographic
studies, Indians are showing heart disease symptoms at young age and there are
approximately 30 million CAD patients in the country. This number is expected to
double by 2015. These patients will definitely need more and more medical check up
and diagnosis facilities, that are not available at this point of time. This will give
scope to Bella to capture the growing market. Third factor is raising awareness
towards health that in turn increasing willingness of Indians to pay for medical
services. Willingness is one of the critical factors in any market and in this case this
factor is already in favour of medical industry and so of Bella healthcare.
These favouring factors come with the great challenges, which Bella has to tackle.
First challenge is competition with world class healthcare company GE, local
company BPL health and few more Chinese and Korean companies. These

companies have already captured considerable market. But not all of them are
providing complete solutions to suit Indian market. Primary need of the Indian market
is cost effective medical instruments. Few companies are providing cheaper
solutions but those solutions come without any warranty and post sale customer
service. Bella has identified the challenge and need of providing cost effective
complete solution to satisfy needs of Indian market and defined its product TKO with
four design principles; profitability, affordability, ease-of-use and connectivity.
Many of the Indian families fall in low income categories and health insurance
facilities are not yet spread across the country, especially rural part of the country.
Because of these factors Indians are more inclined towards cheaper medical
facilities and so investors are inclined towards reasonable ROI. This justifies the
profitability and affordability criteria of Bellas TKO, which will help medical
professionals to set up good ROI on its investment while providing affordable
solution to the people.
Limited number of physicians and specialists in the country can limit the use of TKO.
Also concentration of population in small towns and villages, where transport
facilities are not up to the mark, creates need of portable devices. To tackle these
issues Bella has defined its third design principle of ease-to-use. This will make
TKO weight 2 Kg. or less and one touch operating device so that physicians could
handle it with minimum training. Indian villages still face electricity issues and Bella is
will provide solution to this problem by giving battery operated device. Bella is
addressing issue of unavailability of trained physicians with its fourth design principle
connectivity. This design feature will help physician to transmit data wirelessly to
cardiac speciality centres and work with general practitioners to diagnose the issue.
Thus these four design principles will help Bella to address all the key issues of heart
disease diagnosis equipments. In addition to the new wireless data transfer feature,
Bellas design team is exploring the possibility of adding DICOM feature in TKO.
Even though DICOM feature is not critical in near future, it will help Bella to
differentiate its product from GEs similar product and will give upper hand in
marketing the device.
Now, lets concentrate on internal factors. Bella healthcare India, part of global
organisation, has its own strengths, which will lead it to the successful handling of
TKO. First strength of the company is its India head Joseph Cherian, who has
handled initial set up of Bella India and successfully leaded the production of many
devices, and Design head Jeremy Manning, who came from US with 10 years of rich

experience in medical devices development and manufacturing. Cherian has his own
proven, tough and no-nonsense management style and he always keeps close eye
on production schedules and product quality. These two leaders worked together
before with Bella India team for successful delivery of Fiit X17 and so are aware of
strengths, weaknesses and issues of Indian design and production teams. This
awareness will help them to identify and tackle different issues. It will also help them
to define strategy, which will suit to the Indian organisation. Most important, both the
leaders are very confident about TKO and that will help them to lead the team to the
success.
Second factor is easy and ample availability of Indian engineering talent at affordable
cost. This talent can be best utilised further with the product specific trainings. This
makes replacement and expansion of the work force easy in difficult situations. Third
factor, that makes Bella India more suitable for TKO, is its cultural and location
proximity to the Indian market. This helps team to understand and address key
needs of Indian market. Also, proximity will help to find low cost component suppliers
and deal with them effectively. These elements will reduce cost of production, speed
up the prototype and production process and in turn will reduce time to market.
Fourth factor is already built and proven base of cost effective manufacturing of Bella
India. This shows the experience of the unit in cost reduction techniques. This
experience further will help to reduce TKO development and production cost. This
prediction of cost effectiveness can be substantiated by Exhibit 1, which depicts that
design and production in India will reduce the production cost to approximately 55%.
Also, even though TKO is new project for Bella India, its parent company in US has a
single channel EKG product already marketed. This may help Indian team to get any
last minute design assistance or make them aware of common problems the product
will face. This will speed up their design and production process.
Last and foremost important internal factor is experience of the Bella Indias team of
many successful production deliveries and failure of project Baton. This not only
helped team to realise its strength but also helped to understand its mistakes.
Experience of Baton has already covered the learning curve of the team and that is
one of key speeding factor to TKO.
Bella Healthcare India will definitely face few issues during TKO production. One of
the key issues is time to market, especially when companies such as GE, BPL are
already in market. But the well equipped, talented, experienced team of Bella with its

four design principles will handle all the issues and lead to the success. Looking at
the features Bella is incorporating in TKO; it is not providing EGK equipment but the
complete solution for CAD diagnosis. If the team successfully completes this project
and captures even 10% of the market for TKO, it will provide approximately $3
million business, over the period of approximately 7 years, to Bella Healthcare. If I
move out of the boundaries of India and consider other developing countries, then
the prospects for business are even higher as most of the developing countries have
similar criteria for healthcare facilities and equipments

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