DKMS – Faster and easier stem cell donation

With over 12 million registered donors, DKMS has arranged more than 115,000 stem cell donations. In addition to Germany, DKMS is active in the USA, Poland, the UK, Chile, India, and South Africa. In addition to the various locations, different national entities and many specialized departments accompany the individual steps toward stem cell donation.

Therefore, we were all the more pleased when Jan Storz approached us with the challenge of finding out where the most significant levers for digitizing DKMS lie. How can processes be accelerated, how can the donor user experience be improved, and how can the potential around the use of AI be determined? Within five months, we presented DKMS with a detailed innovation map.

The solution

How does an external team navigate an international company with a multitude of highly specialized work steps? Our team Exploratory Strategy Development took a deep dive into the matter:

• Onboarding, interviews and shadowing with employees from all departments
• Identification of hurdles and potential in each department's processes
• Examination of the employees' tool sets
• Understanding of medical regulations
• Development of an overall picture of the processes
• Addition of the role of the donors: How does the donor experience the process?
• Differentiated analysis of international processes

Kai Höfler, IT Director at DKMS

„To achieve successful digitization that supports the company's goals, processes must be considered end-to-end. With its process expertise, Intuity helps DKMS to design good digital end-to-end processes.”

Comparing with reality

We aggregated the findings into clear flows and fed the resulting knowledge back to the organization. As theory and practice are not always the same, we then supplemented our theoretical findings with impressions from practical experience. For this purpose, we accompanied employees at different DKMS locations in their daily work.

The value created

Based on this, we developed 25 innovation hypotheses for DKMS and combined them into nine actionable packages. In a final workshop, we evaluated the initiatives with the relevant stakeholders. The initiatives are currently being implemented.