Bella Healthcare India Case Report

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Bella Healthcare India Case Report

Joseph Cherian, country director of Bella Healthcare in India, was determining whether his team was ready to develop Project TKO. Manning, Bella India’s local director of research and development, described the pros and the cons of the project. The project was basically a proposal to develop a new portable electrocardiograph machine (EKG) especially for the Indian market. Manning mentioned to Joseph that India was an emerging economy, and that Bella Healthcare India’s main goal was to develop an affordable EKG in India, for India.  General Electric and Philips were the leading manufacturers of EKG devices, combining for over 50% market share.

Bella Healthcare was founded in 1969 in St. Louis, Missouri, by brothers Tood and Greg Bella. First, it started as a manufacturer of Holter monitors but, later they develop their own version of the Holter. This device was more comfortable for patients and more reliable than competing devices. Tood and Greg launched their company, Bella Healthcare, with the new improved Holter device. Bella Healthcare has sales offices in Europe and other Asian markets. In the 1990s, the company established a lean, low cost manufacturing facility in India.

The main questions to be analyzed in this case are determining whether the Bella India team is fully equipped to lead a new development project and if Project TKO is the right one to tackle.

Based on the Bella Healthcare case it states that even though the Bella Indian team was young and inexperienced, they were expected to perform at Bella Healthcare’s high standards and at much lower cost. A great example that shows Bella India capability is when the team met their product performance and cost objectives for the Fitt Project X17, and they did so on time. As we read in the case the Project Baton did failed but this wasn’t due to the Bella Indian team fault. There were many factors that affected the failure of Project Baton. One of the was the cross border coordination or changes of distance, there were a lot of late-night conference calls and frequent travel between St. Louis and Bangalore which proved to be a great challenge. Also, there were a lot of differences in working and communication styles. A great obstacle that the two teams faced was when Bella India team cared mostly about designing for manufacturing and St. Louis focused more on quality of the device, they couldn’t agree in priority between design engineers and manufacturing. Another factor that marked Project Baton’s failure was managing suppliers. Asian suppliers agreed to all the requests of the St. Louis team, however, they often proceeded to deliver on their own timetable. According to all of this information my analysis shows that the Bella Indian team is very well prepared to lead a new project, and that not just because of one failure, they shouldn’t risk their future success. Also, the company should look for different suppliers just in case one doesn’t meet deadlines they have a backup supplier or a plan b.