Medical Devices and Equipment

Medical Device Supply Network and Contract Manufacturing Challenges

Medical device and equipment manufacturers face a tough environment to survive and thrive in. An aging population supports demand growth yet cost pressures are growing, regulators are becoming more active, new entrants are popping up everywhere and consumer demand is becoming increasingly segmented across all device classes.

To maintain profitability, attack new market opportunities and maintain customer service, you need greater operational efficiency not only within your four walls, you need to create and share these efficiencies across your entire supplier, contract manufacturing partner and customer supply network. Yet, if not done right, the push for agility and cost reduction by virtualizing the manufacture of devices and equipment can hurt if it increases management costs, risks product availability, compromises quality standards and slips schedules.

How TraceLink can help Medical Device companies

• Improve device supply predictability.  Growing demand for medical devices across all three classes, new competitors entering the market and high costs of idle channel inventory all mandate a lean manufacturing process that delivers on time, on spec and where needed.  With device manufacturing spread across multiple contract partners, synchronizing production schedules, material deliveries, quality reviews and other production processes for smooth predictable device supply to end points can be a challenge.
• TraceLink’s Predictable Supply Suite can help by improving visibility and coordination at each step in the production process. Across your entire outsourced network, gain insight into current production status, identify potential manufacturing, material or quality issues before they threaten schedules and reduce delays along the entire production lifecycle. 

• Reduce operational costs.  Slowing top-line growth, increased material costs and heightened competition all serve to pressure profit margins. In response, you need to reduce operating overhead, reduce on-hand inventory, and reduce the cash-to-cash cycle time.
• TraceLink’s Predictable Supply Suite can help by reducing process delays, eliminating manual work steps and improving accuracy at all points in the production lifecycle. Automate data collection and analysis, lean inventory levels by leveraging accurate supply inventory data and optimize production planning with enhanced metrics on outsourced manufacturing, contract partner and supplier performance.

• Manage outsourced product and channel complexity. You coordinate with tens to hundreds of component suppliers, contract manufacturers and sub-assemblers along with distribution partners. Orchestrating new orders and production schedules across this supply network is tough and efficient interoperability is virtually impossible when relying on phone, FAX, email and other out-of-band communications. Traditional ERP systems seem like an answer until, supporting the divergent data requirements, unique business process specifications and diverse technical capabilities in existence among supply partners creates a Portal management nightmare across the network.
• TraceLink’s Predictable Supply Suite can help by providing a flexible manufacturing and supply collaboration environment that gets your virtual teams sharing information and insight with Tier-1 and long-tail contract partners. Quickly create secure business Clouds that connects the people, business processes and information that you need on a per-partner, per-product or per-project basis. Without massive overhead and technical complexity, get team members sharing production status, quality documents, inventory information, notes, discussions and other contextual information in whatever form they need when they need it.

• Reduce production and business risk. Missed production schedules, missed quality levels and missed customer orders are often caused by lack of communication and lack of coordination, not bad intent. Production data and related artifacts are rarely stored in one form and are rarely accessible to everyone who needs it when they need it. Internal and contract manufacturing production teams often have different views of reality because they are working off of different information. Delays pile up as teams wait for reviews and sign-offs.
• TraceLink’s Predictable Supply Suite can help by enabling your internal and contract manufacturing teams to securely keep production documentation and communications in one workspace, easily available to team members. In addition, our built-in visibility and analytics tools provide proactive insight when current production plans are going wrong, allowing you to intervene before an unanticipated issue becomes a lost sale.

Next steps

• Try It Yourself.  In minutes, launch a no obligation FREE TRIAL of our Predictable Supply Suite. Create your own Process Link collaborative team workspace, invite and quickly connect to virtual team members, then experience a new world of production visibility and tracking across your contract manufacturing operations!
• Demo Production Tracking.  Request a guided PERSONAL DEMO of our Production Tracking and ProcessLink solutions. On your schedule, one of our team members will take you through our solution.

Explore More

• Discover Production Tracking.  Find out how the TraceLink Production Tracking solution can give you visibility and control throughout the entire contract manufacturing lifecycle. Go Production Tracking
• Experience ProcessLink.  Review TraceLink's innovative approach to connecting you and your internal contract manufacturing teams to your partners both fast and flexibly. Go ProcessLink