December 9, 2022 – The pandemic and the supply chain crisis exposed vulnerabilities in the healthcare supply chain during the past three years as the U.S. was hit with shortages of critical therapies and medical supplies. International healthcare manufacturers with U.S. customers reassessed their strategies to become more resilient, and reshoring manufacturing back to North America became critical.
B. Braun, an international medical device maker with its global headquarters in Germany, has operated in the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania since 1979. It opened its Allentown, Pennsylvania, campus in 1985 and recently expanded there with a more than $200 million, 310,000-square-foot addition. The expansion will add over 200 jobs to B. Braun’s existing 1,500 workforce in Allentown and aims to revolutionize manufacturing of medical devices, including life-sustaining infusion therapy devices to treat millions of patients in the U.S.
“Years before anyone heard of COVID-19 or the supply chain crisis, B. Braun made a commitment to expand its manufacturing capacity in the U.S. by investing more than $1 billion in new and modernized production facilities,” said Jean-Claude Dubacher, chairman and CEO of B. Braun of America Inc., in a statement. “The purpose was to increase the production of healthcare products needed to deliver critical care to patients in the U.S., to keep our manufacturing operations close to our customers and to reduce the potential for future supply disruptions that could put patients at risk.”
B. Braun’s U.S. commitments were seen across five states – Pennsylvania, Florida, California, Arizona and Texas – as well as in the Dominican Republic.
The recent Pennsylvania expansion nearly doubles B. Braun’s footprint in Allentown, and it includes state-of-the-art digitalization and automation technologies to improve efficiencies and connect all production steps and business processes.
Read more in the latest issue of Repertoire Magazine.