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Why Outsourcing Could Be the Key to Your Growth

When you’re looking to accelerate growth, you focus on opportunity and optimization. Well-planned, well-managed growth is attained through cumulative success in patient outcomes, innovative products, and increased market share. It also comes through operational optimization that generates higher profits and an increase in working capital.

Fueling continued growth is critical to your success. The day your business stops growing is the day it starts to shrink. This is especially true in the medical device industry, a truly competitive market.

Growth, though, can be expensive. Ensuring you have the quality-driven capabilities and processes in place to fuel growth is a challenge that demands time and resources, both of which can be scarce for small to mid-size organizations.

In this industry, success that drives growth depends on triumphant and effective product launches. It also demands adherence to FDA and notified body standards.

While your true growth potential lies in R&D, design, and product manufacturing, it’s unrealizable unless you can get to market efficiently to deliver positive outcomes for your patients. That’s where you make a difference. That’s why you’re in business, after all.

Often the best way to drive your innovation, marketing and growth is to partner in a cost-effective way to get your product to market. After all, buildings, systems, and personnel are all requirements for such capabilities as packaging and distribution. But they can be a drain on your resources. Outsourcing to a trusted partner is often the most effective allocation of resources, saving on your fixed costs and augmenting your abilities without adding to your overhead expenses.

Let’s look at a few prime examples of critical components in the medical device manufacturer supply chain.

Packaging

Clean rooms take up space and require consistent regulation and monitoring from quality assurance teams. They also take up a lot of resources, including utilities and people. These resources inflate your cost structure— as they all come with a price tag.

Yet you have to be able to reliably and confidently package your products in these validated spaces to ensure safe delivery of parts to surgeries and—ultimately—your patients. Packaging is a critical component of getting to market efficiently, and if your packaging is not up to par with industry standards and regulations, what happens? You may never get to market at all.

Distribution

Getting devices and parts where they need to be, when they need to be there, is critical to OEM success. Furthermore, distribution in the medical device industry requires niche and nuanced expertise—it’s a quality-driven process in this field. But just like packaging, while distribution is not a core competency, it is absolutely critical to your growth. Poor distribution costs you money, time and opportunity. For small to mid-sized OEMs, engaging a distribution partner can represent the first step toward a new level of growth.

Loaner kits and field returns

The same is true for field returns and loaner kit management. Both require quality-driven, detailed processes to track, clean and inspect your implants and instruments. Yet quick turns are essential to effectively serve your customer base, launch a new account, or respond to a frantic, last-minute order. The right partner can offer you quality-driven processes at scale with quick turns, turning a necessary evil into a competitive advantage.

Best product, best processes

Your core competencies include designing and manufacturing products and expanding your customer base. Everything else is something you can’t really afford to do if your goal is rapid growth.

Great outcomes start with great products and are backed by excellent processes. That’s what outsourcing with the right partner can ultimately provide: the expertise, capability and scale to get your product where it needs to be quickly and safely, while giving you the ability to focus on your core competencies.

With expertise and scale in place, you can save costs and focus on what you do best. You can nurture and grow your customer base. And you gain the confidence that comes from knowing that you have all the components in place to get to market safely—fast and in compliance.

At Millstone, we get it. We believe quality drives patient success. That’s why we’ve perfected all the capabilities medical device manufacturers need to get to market. Today we offer post-manufacturing and aftermarket services to more than 50 customers, including the largest orthopedic companies in the world. We are constantly evolving our processes and services to help OEMs achieve sustainable success. We offer clean room packaging, medical device specific warehousing, finished goods distribution, loaner kit management, advanced inspection and after-market services—all with an unparalleled focus on quality.

What could we help you do better? Learn more at https://millstonemedical.com