Competing and winning as a new business in the highly competitive medical products industry takes far more than being able to quote price, availability, and delivery dates accurately. Every manufacturer in the sector can do that. What it takes for a medical products company and its outsourcing partners to thrive and grow is a core set of best practices that they excel at together.
 
This article examines a framework for medical process outsourcer (MPO) best practices that manufacturers can reference in putting into place the processes and systems to grow their customers and revenues, regardless of their limitations or location.
 
1. Collaborate with Customers
Among the most important initiatives for any MPO is creating a knowledge-sharing network that includes mentors, customers, suppliers, vendors, employees, and senior management. Maintaining such a network establishes a mechanism for exchanging valuable engineering, quality, procurement, and workflow insights. This facilitates the ability to collaborate closely on new product designs and support for new product launches, and in doing so drives opportunities to accelerate growth.
 
Equally important as an outsourcer is internalizing customers’ goals and providing progress updates on how the MPO is contributing to their business. This is essential to gaining medical product manufacturers’ trust and winning a greater share of their overall projects.
 
2. Grow the Business on a Foundation of Quality
Every MPO is tempted to take on deals that are borderline profitable, with little if any margin for error. However, working with manufacturers and brands that look for the lowest-cost supplier and are willing to sacrifice quality is a major mistake that can jeopardize quality and the long-term reputation of an outsourcer. Instead, the more manufacturers adopt a culture that embraces customer quality, the easier it is to say no to deals that are borderline profitable if at all.
 
Important to making decisions about deals is understanding the costs of quality and what factors most and least influence them. This enables sales and senior management teams to set threshold pricing for every deal to maintain their quality, as well as identify what deals most and least fit with their quality goals. A primary benefit for companies that take this approach is that they now attract the types of quality-focused customers who are best to do business with over the long-term.
 
3. Maximize Mentoring Opportunities
MPOs should seek to capitalize on the strongest mentoring relationships the company has to accelerate learning in the key areas of compliance, quality management, and continuous process improvement. Some of those mentors may even come from customers. We have seen first-hand how working with a major producer of manufacturing test and measurement devices provided an opportunity to gain an accelerated education in how to excel at creating molds, customizing production capacity, and monitoring quality, among other skills.
 
At the same time, MPOs need to invest in mentoring their own employees. An integrated set of internal programs aimed at developing team members’ skills may include:
 

• Technician Training Program – Participating employees are each assigned a mentor, and they receive bi-monthly training by an outside scientific molding consultant in addition to on-the-job training.
• Summer High School and College Internships – Entry-level positions help students to gain work experience.
• IQ Experts Group – Staff members in the group, who come from all departments, take on IQ projects and receive specialized training.
• Job Shadow Program – In this on-the-job training, an employee who wants to become familiar with a different job follows and observes a trained and experienced employee. Employees in the program can develop a realistic understanding about a career, including the tasks performed, work responsibilities, education and training requirements, job outlook, and work environment. 

 
4. Invest in Technology to Support Quality and Growth Initiatives
Increasingly, technology investments are becoming critical to ensuring the success of quality and growth initiatives for MPOs and their customers. For example, work with high tech and medical products companies requires the ability to make precise measurements, which are supported by investing in state-of-the-art calibration equipment, such as the Carl Zeiss metrology device shown above.
 
At the same time, manufacturers need to replace manual processes with automated ones if they are to keep pace with growth. Here an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system can automate processes, such as inventory management, material requirement planning, and production scheduling to provide greater visibility and efficiency.
 
Technology investments can present significant hurdles for some MPOs. However, one strategy is to start with a cloud ERP implementation, which minimizes upfront costs. Due to the strict compliance requirements faced by the medical industry, MPOs should implement a cloud ERP offering that lets them determine when any system upgrades are made, since the upgrades may require them to submit new compliance documentation. At the same time, MPOs should evaluate whether vendors offer their software both on premises and in the cloud. This will provide the flexibility to adapt if future customer requirements require some processes to run on premises.
 
5. Move Toward Lights-Out Manufacturing
Becoming a lights-out manufacturing facility—in which one or more shifts run autonomously—enables MPOs to keep the costs of quality under control and still offer competitive pricing to win opportunities throughout Asia and Europe. Additionally, it helps to address the very real shortage of qualified employees skilled in production techniques.
 
The keys to achieving a lights-out manufacturing strategy are two-fold. First is integrating high-capacity machinery with robots to enable high-capacity, automated manufacturing in the range of 1 million parts per week. Second is integrating real-time monitoring with every machine on the shop floor. Real-time monitoring provides the rich, contextually relevant data stream that production and quality engineers need to keep machinery running continuously during lights-out manufacturing shifts. Additionally, it keeps production focused on customers’ expectations for quality and on-time delivery.
 
Moreover, integrated real-time monitoring provides immediate visibility into how production lines are performing and potential quality issues. It also enables an MPO to optimize every available production hour and cost-effectively meet tight customer deadlines by balancing workloads across its many production machines, increasing customer satisfaction and profitability.
 
Conclusion
Today, the strongest competitive advantage an MPO can bring to the table is the ability to become a trusted provider of consistently high-quality products and components that are tailored to customers’ needs and are delivered on time, cost effectively. By applying the five key best practices outlined here, an MPO will be well-positioned to grow its business by becoming that trusted provider. These include commitments to collaborating with customers, using quality as a compass for directing the business, maximizing mentoring, investing in enabling technologies, and moving to lights-out manufacturing. Importantly, these best practices are scalable across any MPO, from startups to established companies seeking to accelerate growth.
 

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Louis Columbus, a principal at manufacturing enterprise resource planning company IQMS, brings two decades of enterprise software marketing and management experience.

Mariann Schindler, director of business development at Vision Plastics Inc., has been managing plastics manufacturing projects for 19 years.