Designing a distributor management portal for one of the world's largest medical device companies — giving BD's global distributor network a unified view of contracts, compliance, and commercial performance.
01 — CHALLENGE
Becton Dickinson operates a complex global distributor network across medical devices, diagnostics, and life sciences — with thousands of distributors managing contracts, regulatory certifications, performance targets, and compliance requirements across hundreds of markets. Before CC360, distributors were managing these relationships through a patchwork of email, PDF contracts, spreadsheets, and regional sales rep coordination. Critical information was siloed, compliance gaps were discovered late, and BD's internal teams lacked visibility into distributor health at a portfolio level.
The CC360 initiative set out to bring all of this onto a single Salesforce-powered platform. But Salesforce out-of-the-box was not built for the complexity of BD's distributor relationships — it required extensive customization and, critically, a UX layer that could make the platform usable for distributor contacts who weren't Salesforce power users. The challenge was designing something powerful enough to handle BD's operational complexity without intimidating the people who had to use it.
"Our distributors are managing $40M contracts in a spreadsheet. When something goes wrong we find out three months later."— BD Global Channel Operations Lead
02 — RESEARCH
Medical device distribution exists at the intersection of commercial performance and strict regulatory compliance. Before designing anything, we needed to understand both dimensions deeply. We embedded with BD's channel operations and compliance teams for two weeks, learning the lifecycle of a distributor relationship from onboarding through renewal — and identifying every moment where a lack of system support was creating risk or inefficiency.
2-week immersion
Shadowed BD channel operations and distributor teams across three regions to understand the actual workflows, compliance obligations, and pain points in the current state.
12 process flows
Documented every key workflow in the distributor lifecycle — onboarding, contract management, compliance certification, performance reviews, and renewal — to identify system requirements and design priorities.
28 participants
Tested three prototype iterations with a mix of BD internal users and external distributor contacts to validate navigation models and data presentation approaches.
03 — PROCESS
We structured the design process around two parallel tracks: BD Internal (the team managing distributor relationships) and External Distributor (the contacts at distributor organizations using the portal). These two perspectives had fundamentally different needs — BD needed dashboard-level visibility and exception management, while distributors needed task-oriented clarity and status transparency. We held weekly cross-functional design reviews to ensure the two tracks stayed aligned on the shared data model.
04 — SOLUTION
CC360 launched as a Salesforce Experience Cloud portal with a custom UX layer that surfaces the right information to the right user at the right moment. BD's internal team gets a portfolio dashboard with compliance scorecards, contract renewal pipeline visibility, and automated alerts for certification expirations. External distributors get a simplified task-focused view: here's what you need to do, here's the status of what you've submitted, here's where your certification stands.
The system also introduced a structured onboarding flow for new distributors — replacing an email-and-PDF process with a guided digital workflow that collected, validated, and tracked all required documentation in one place, reducing onboarding time by over two-thirds.
Real-time portfolio-level view of distributor compliance status, with exception alerts and automated escalation triggers for certification gaps — replacing quarterly audit surprises.
Step-by-step digital onboarding flow that replaces email-and-PDF coordination, with real-time status tracking and automated validation of submitted documentation.
End-to-end contract management from creation through renewal, with performance milestone tracking and renewal alerts surfaced proactively before expiration windows close.
05 — RESULTS
CC360 rolled out to BD's top 200 distributor relationships in the first phase, with full global rollout following. The shift from reactive to proactive compliance management was the most significant operational win — BD's channel operations team could now see and act on compliance issues weeks before they became contractual problems. The reduction in onboarding time freed up significant sales rep capacity that was redirected to relationship development.
06 — LEARNINGS
In healthcare and medical devices, ambiguous UI isn't just frustrating — it can have compliance and patient safety implications. Every label, state, and confirmation message had to be precise to the point of over-engineering by consumer UX standards. That rigor made me a better designer across the board.
Working within Salesforce Experience Cloud required adapting design thinking to what the platform could and couldn't do. That constraint actually sharpened decisions — when you can't solve everything with custom development, you focus on what truly matters to users.
The two-week immersion with BD's operations team surfaced workflows and pain points that no amount of formal interviewing would have found. Watching someone do their job — without the frame of "what's your biggest pain point?" — unlocks completely different insights.