Medical Products

Mission Driven

The employees of every manufacturer of medical products and devices share a common mission to improve and save people’s lives. It’s a unique and powerful motivator that drives innovation and an intense focus on safety and quality.

In the United States alone, as the Advanced Medical Technology Association reports, over 6,000 firms supply doctors and hospitals with the instruments, devices and other products that they need to diagnose and treat their patients. These manufacturers have contributed to dramatic declines in mortality and disability, decreased length of hospital stays and increases in life expectancy over recent decades. Those are some performance metrics that really matter.

At the same time the challenges within the medical industry are many, including:

• 100,000 unnecessary patient deaths annually
• 15,000,000 unnecessary patient injuries every year.
• 100,000,000 hospital medication errors annually.

Adding to such patient care failures are escalating costs that now stand at 16.2% of GDP, 50% higher than the next highest country.

Although the economic recession has slowed sales growth temporarily, medical technology companies have continued to invest in R&D. The sector continues to introduce new technology that detects disease earlier, enables less invasive procedures, and yields more effective treatments. In addition to this core area of emphasis, TBM Consulting Group has helped medical product and device companies eliminate order backlogs, improve quality and increase productivity. Other challenges that we’ve helped clients solve include:

• Leveraging policy deployment to focus research and development
• Streamlining R&D processes
• Simplifying regulatory compliance
• Improving customer responsiveness
• Freeing up capital to invest in new acquisitions
• Removing capacity constraints
• And rapidly integrating new acquisitions.

With so many opportunities for improvement, it can be difficult to know where to start. TBM can help you set business priorities and fully leverage Lean and Six Sigma techniques, which we combine as Lean Sigma. We start by helping you build your continuous improvement team’s knowledge and skills, including training, exposure to best practice operations, and hands-on coaching that will ultimately enable your organization to become self-sufficient. Using a combination of project teams and the kaizen breakthrough methodology, we help clients move their operations forward simultaneously in multiple areas. Kaizen teams dramatically improve quality, eliminate unexpected equipment breakdowns, utilize standard operating procedures, create visual factories, free up expensive clean room space for new products, and deliver bottom-line results in line with the strategic objectives of your organization.

It sounds so simple. But as any business leader knows who has dabbled in these techniques and tried to implement such a program with lackluster results, it’s all too easy to become distracted by daily output demands and fall back into old habits. The hardest part is always cultural, which provides the foundation for sustainable progress. If it were easy, everyone would do it and there would be no competitive advantage.
Some of the characteristics that distinguish Lean Sigma medical products operations include:

• Ubiquitous visual production status and quality indicators
• Tight alignment between production with demand
• A strong emphasis on improvement through constant training and communication
• Minimal work-in-process inventory
• Superior order-to-shipment cycle times.
• Timely and on budget innovation , ideation, and new product introduction

"A lean journey needs to be driven from the top down, but executed from the bottom up," says Dave Johnson, Vice President of Global Operations for ConMed.  Adds Johnson, "Lean isn’t a program, it’s a cultural change. If you really want to do that, then you must get buy-in from your senior management team, put your best people into a continuous improvement function, and then start walking the talk on the shop floor on a daily basis."

TBM business consultants have worked with medical products clients around the world to generate breakthrough results. To learn more about our experience and how we can help your company move forward, contact Bill Swisher at 800-438-5535.

“Between 2002 (before lean) and 2004, the lead time for the dispenser unit dropped from 92 minutes to 3.6 minutes. Cycle time decreased by 61 percent and yields improved from 83 percent to 99.98 percent. Quantity built per person per day rose from 162 to 607.”—Ventana Medical Systems, Inc., Tucson, Ariz.