Envisioning excellence in Medical Devices.

Dr John Harhen spoke at the national supply chain workshop of the IMDA, the national Medical Devices manufacturers association. John spoke on the theme of envisioning excellence in supply chain management in Medical Devices Manufacturing.

The medical devices sector carries significant diversity of production processes across sub sectors such as catheters/stents, electronic implants/pacemakers/ICDs, orthopaedic implants/joints, breast implants, diagnostic kits and reagents, hospital products, surgical instruments and hearing aids, etc. If one reviews the cross sectoral trends, common themes clearly emerge:

• the need for supply chain velocity,
• the need for lean operations,
• the need to harvest value from ERP deployments,
• the need to exploit advanced planning architectures and capabilities,
• the need to enhance trading relationships across the supply chain,
• distribution centres and customers,
• the need to "see" along and across supply chains.
• the need to enhance sourcing arrangements, to mention but a few.

Dr Harhen's contribution focused on how supply chain excellence can be created in the medical devices sector, by exploiting technologies and capabilities that already exists, but are under utilized. Deployment is enhanced by clear thinking of what the medical devices sector needs from supply chain management, and what theories of supply chain management can offer, in terms of breaking through towards excellence.

The IMDA supply chain workshop which is open to IMDA member companies took place in Limerick, Ireland on June 10th, 2004. The IMDA is the national business sectoral body, with wide range of tier 1 medical device corporations including Boston Scientific, Medtronic, Guidant, Johnson and Johnson, Abbott, Bayer, Stryker, Becton Dickinson, Baxter etc , and many tier 2 and tier 3 supplier companies.

Further details of the IMDA are available at www.ibec.ie/IMDA

To request a copy of Dr Harhen's contribution, send a mail to info@orbsenconsulting.com. (available after the event).