Connected Enterprise: A Phased Approach to Driving Organizational Adoption | Propulsion 2025

In this user adoption success story, Hassan Mahmoud and Paul Rohlwing detail Surmodics’ deliberate, three-year journey from disconnected legacy systems to a unified, enterprise-wide PLM and QMS ecosystem. Tasked with bringing digital transformation to a company with little PLM experience, the duo embraced a phased implementation strategy that emphasized practical wins, early adopters, and cross-functional collaboration.

Together, they outline how each phase—starting with a single business unit’s need for speed-to-market—gradually evolved into an enterprise standard for quality and change management. Their story is a blueprint for manufacturers seeking to modernize operations, unify systems, and foster adoption across siloed teams.

KEY INSIGHTS

PAUL:
"The biggest win we were going to get was going electronic. Our CAPA process used to be five different paper forms with 20 different signatures. The biggest win was getting that into the system. So with that, we pushed through all our quality system processes rapidly."

"When we looked back at what the change processes were taking, that initial process took, on average, about 278 days to run through MasterControl. We've cut that down to 73 days."

HASSAN:
"This was the holistic vision for all QMS processes that we started with. We were trying to fit in as much as we could, in the right steps that made sense, to achieve the ultimate goal. By the time of the final migration, user adoption was improving—people were starting to understand and getting a little more excited about what PLM could do. They're seeing it in action."

"We had one naysayer who made a 180-degree change in mindset. He’s on board, wants to be part of what’s moving forward, and sees the value in it. We turned the tide on what people thought about the system—the headwinds became tailwinds."

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