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2021. 11. 24. | Time to read: 2 min
Taylor "TJ" Allison is an account executive at Drishti.
I’ve been working with clients in the medical device manufacturing space for a few years now, and repeatedly they tell me how critical manual assembly is to their operations. Medical device assembly requires a lot of precision work that is difficult to automate. Humans provide a level of dexterity and cognition that simply doesn’t exist in a robot today.
But when it comes to the drawbacks of human workers, primarily variability, medical device manufacturers feel it the hardest. That’s probably why, in a recent Drishti survey, they were the only industry that listed “investing in technology to augment human workers” as a top strategy for becoming more lean.
Medical device manufacturing is all about quality, and it can’t be overstated how dire the consequences can be if a defective product is allowed to escape the factory. Because one source of defects is human errors, medical device manufacturers are hyper focused on ensuring that standardized work is performed precisely every time. Technology like Drishti can add an extra layer of protection by monitoring each cycle and step, and alerting the line associate when a step is missed or performed out of sequence. It’s one more rung on the ladder to lean maturity.
An eye to the future
The future of medical device manufacturing isn’t crystal clear; in fact, 56% of survey respondents said the industry was going to change “significantly” in the next few years, while another 22% were uncertain about what to expect. That’s a full 78% of medical device respondents looking at the future without feeling confident about what tomorrow holds.
How can anyone prepare for something so nebulous?
The answer, again, is human workers. In fact, more than half of the respondents said that, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, they viewed humans as more valuable to assembly operations than they did prior to 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic underscored just how fragile manufacturing is; that because it is a massive industry that counts on a variety of constants — raw materials and supplies, labor, stable economies, etc. — the growing number of external threats to production make adaptability a number one priority.
And it’s not just external factors that cause instability in manufacturing. Internal challenges, like quality issues, frequently changing processes and training/onboarding new line associates, are a constant impact on production. Here’s where technology again comes into play: If medical device manufacturers have a solution like Drishti, which in addition to monitoring for quality-compromising errors and standard work deviations can also be used to cut training and onboarding time in half, they maintain competitive advantage.
Medical device manufacturers understand and value the advantage that human workers bring to their assembly lines; 74% agreed with the statement, “The more manual you are, the more adaptable.” That’s why we see so many in the industry turning to Drishti to help them get the most out of their workforce.
