Medical imaging and radiotherapy equipment have lifespans of 5 to 10 years — and during that window, after-sales service shifts from a cost center to a strategic revenue engine. For high-end equipment manufacturers operating globally, service consistency and response speed become as important as the product itself; an unplanned hour of downtime at a hospital disrupts patient care, billing, and equipment ROI calculations all at once.
For United Imaging Healthcare (UIH) — a publicly listed medical imaging leader operating across five continents — that reality forced a rethink of how field service should work at global scale. With over 8,000 employees including 3,200 in R&D, a product portfolio spanning MR, CT, XR, PET, and radiotherapy systems, and customers in hospitals on five continents, UIH needed a service platform that could match the scale and complexity of its installed base.
Company Background
Headquartered in Shanghai, with regional headquarters in the United States, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, and Poland, UIH was founded in 2011 by former Siemens executives. The company has grown into one of the world's notable medical imaging manufacturers, with over 80 product models — including industry-firsts such as the uMR Jupiter 5T, the world's first whole-body 5.0T MR system.
R&D centers in Shanghai, Houston, and other locations work alongside production facilities in China and the United States, supporting a global service footprint that competes directly with GE Healthcare, Siemens Healthineers, and Philips.By 2023, UIH was generating approximately USD 1.6 billion in revenue with USD 280 million in net income — a scale that intensified the operational stakes of its after-sales service function.
The Challenge
A 2018 internal study identified four structural problems in UIH's after-sales operations.
Management visibility lagged by hours or days. Field engineers traveled constantly between cities. UIH's in-house "SOP" system, built in 2013 and live since 2014, was PC-only — meaning engineers could only enter work data after returning to their offices. Management saw updates in the evening; for less diligent engineers, updates could lag by a week. Most field activity was invisible to headquarters in real time.
Standardized workflows and on-the-job guidance didn't exist. When engineers hit a complex equipment fault, finding a solution depended on personal networks and experience. Veteran engineers could call colleagues; new hires couldn't. In a field with high engineer turnover, this knowledge bottleneck created service inconsistency.
Internal collaboration was scattered across messaging tools. Engineers and salespeople joined dozens of chat groups across messaging platforms. Information overload made it hard to filter what actually mattered. Work was executed in one place and logged in another, breaking the chain of customer-facing data.
Knowledge couldn't be captured or reused. The legacy system tracked process completion but not the substance of how problems were solved. UIH had policy documents and templates, but inconsistent execution meant individual experience never became institutional knowledge.These pain points weren't theoretical. UIH's service organization had committed to a 10-minute response SLA in its home market and 1-hour solution delivery, operating 24/7/365. Meeting that commitment at the scale of a global installed base required a real platform — not workflows held together by chat groups and PC-bound databases.
The Solution
UIH's first attempt at modernizing the platform predated ShareCRM. In 2018, the company began an implementation built on Salesforce, with IBM as the system integrator handling business analysis and process documentation. The pre-sales portion proceeded; the after-sales portion did not. Field service never went live on the new platform, and the team continued operating on the legacy SOP system.The lesson UIH took from that experience: after-sales service is not pre-sales workflow with different fields.
Field service requires mobile-first design, dispatch logic that accounts for distance and workload, parts management, and a different definition of "customer" — the asset on the hospital floor, not just the buyer of the asset.In late 2020, UIH's after-sales business unit reopened the platform evaluation. After multi-round scoring against several competing vendors, ShareCRM was selected for three reasons:
- Process depth on the after-sales side. ShareCRM's manufacturing customer base had built and battle-tested field service workflows that aligned with UIH's reality — work-order lifecycle, engineer check-in, parts requisition, post-service review. The configurations didn't have to be invented; they had to be adapted.
- Sales-to-service integration in a single platform. For UIH, after-sales is also a revenue function: out-of-warranty service contracts, parts sales, equipment upgrades. ShareCRM handled the full lifecycle from service request through quote, order, and revenue collection on one platform — without forcing the after-sales team into a tool designed for pre-sales.
- Open PaaS and low-code customization. UIH needed to model complex object relationships — devices, IB (installed base) structures, warranty terms, maintenance plans, dispatch rules — without writing every workflow in code. ShareCRM's PaaS made this configurable rather than custom-developed.
The project kicked off in May 2021. By August 2021, Customer Care and Technical Support teams were live. By November 2021, all field engineers were on the platform. The Spare Parts team went live in March 2022; overseas spare parts in June 2022; sales and overseas engineers in early 2023; project closure in February 2023 — a 21-month delivery for a global multi-tenant deployment integrating with Oracle ERP, the existing Salesforce environment for pre-sales, MES, PLM, OA, the call center system, and Lark.Once deployed, the platform reshaped four operational areas.
Mobile field service.
Engineers receive dispatched work orders, check in on arrival, log time, request parts, and capture customer signatures — all from the mobile app. The moment an engineer checks in at a hospital, the relevant clinical staff receive a notification with the engineer's name, contact number, and arrival confirmation. Service completion triggers an immediate customer satisfaction survey via messaging channel. The data stream is continuous; the friction is gone.
Intelligent dispatch. UIH's dispatch engine scores eligible engineers across three dimensions: device responsibility (20%), proximity to the hospital (40%), and current workload (40%). Engineers without required certifications, out of province, on leave, or already loaded with active tickets are excluded automatically. The result is faster on-site response and more rational use of a finite engineer pool.
Knowledge capture and AI-assisted troubleshooting. With nearly 100,000 work orders flowing through ShareCRM each year, UIH and ShareCRM jointly built — using Lark and AI tools — a system that surfaces relevant historical fault resolutions when an engineer keyword-searches a current issue. For new engineers, this collapses the experience curve dramatically; for the organization, individual expertise finally becomes institutional asset.
Escalation that actually escalates. Through the ShareCRM-Lark integration, any field workflow that needs escalation triggers an urgent Lark message to the responsible party on mobile. If there's no response within 15 minutes, the system auto-escalates — including auto-dialing a phone call. For a service organization committed to 1-hour solution delivery, this matters.UIH and ShareCRM also co-built the electronic service report module. Hospitals require detailed annual service reports per installed device — maintenance history, uptime percentage, parts replaced, recommendations. In Shanghai alone, with hundreds of installed devices, generating these reports manually took the department one to two months per year. The new module took report generation from 30-60 minutes per report down to under 10 minutes.
The Results
Operational scale at full production. ShareCRM now processes approximately 100,000 work orders annually across UIH's global service organization. The platform integrates with Oracle ERP, the existing Salesforce environment for pre-sales, MES, PLM, OA, the call center system, and Lark — serving as the operational backbone for both home-market and overseas after-sales operations.
Field service KPIs delivered at global scale. The service team holds its 10-minute response SLA in its home market and 1-hour solution delivery commitment on a 24/7/365 basis. Engineers across five continents operate from a single mobile platform with consistent dispatch logic. A unified spare parts network behind the platform supports service delivery wherever a UIH device is installed.
Service report generation: from 60 minutes to under 10. In manufacturing service operations, annual report preparation is a significant hidden cost. For a regional manager with hundreds of installed devices, the math compounds quickly. By cutting per-report time by 6x and digitizing delivery, UIH redirected engineer hours back to billable field work. The first year of electronic reports produced approximately 10,000 reports and saved an estimated CN¥200,000 in print and mail costs alone — before counting the labor recovered.
Real-time management visibility, not weekly retrospectives. Before ShareCRM, manager dashboards required department assistants to manually extract data and build reports — a process that delivered the prior half-month's performance roughly a week after the fact. With the new BI dashboards, leadership across regions and levels operates on real-time data. Sales reps and engineers see their own positions, targets, and opportunity pipelines without waiting for a manager to relay them.
Conclusion
UIH's after-sales transformation is, in a real sense, a story about what happens when a platform choice fits the actual operational shape of a business. The 2018 attempt with a global CRM platform, supported by one of the world's largest system integrators, did not fail because of the brand or the integrator — it failed because field service has a different operational topology than pre-sales, and forcing it into the same mold doesn't work.
UIH still runs its pre-sales operations on that earlier platform, by design.ShareCRM's selection in 2021 wasn't a lift-and-shift; it was a rebuild aligned with how UIH's service organization actually operates. Three years on, that decision is paying out at the scale that matters: 100,000 annual work orders, global service consistency, and a real platform on which UIH can keep growing its after-sales revenue without growing its operational drag at the same rate.Ready to rebuild your after-sales operations around the shape of your actual service business? Talk to a ShareCRM specialist →
