Manufacturers discuss the benefits that domestic manufacturing creates for local communities and for the U.S. healthcare supply chain overall.
For this issue, Repertoire Magazine reached out to several members of the med/surg manufacturing community to get a better feel for how domestic manufacturing plays into their strategy, company culture, and how it benefits the industry and local communities they are based in.
Bionix: Enhancing Opportunities
Manufacturing products in the United States strengthens Bionix’s operations and sales by fostering strong relationships, ensuring quality, enhancing responsiveness, maintaining availability, complying with regulatory standards, and aligning with shared values, the company told Repertoire.
“This collectively contributes to Bionix’s competitiveness and ability to deliver superior medical devices to its customers.”
Bionix shared several insights related to its manufacturing strategy with Repertoire:
What are the benefits to your local economy and community?
Bionix has been a part of the Toledo economy for 40 years, generating tangible benefits for the local economy, community, and workforce. Through job creation, economic stimulus, community engagement, and support for local businesses, Bionix plays a vital role in enhancing the quality of life and opportunities for individuals and families in the area.
How does this strategy benefit your customers and end-users?
Bionix’s strategy of manufacturing in the United States and maintaining strong relationships with domestic partners directly translates into tangible benefits for its customers and end-users, including consistent quality, clinical value, transparency, innovation, and market leadership. These benefits ultimately contribute to improved patient care and outcomes.
How has the U.S. healthcare supply chain changed now that we’ve entered a post-pandemic market?
Post-pandemic, there is a need for greater sensitivity to a more global, comprehensive understanding of supply chain for both consumers and manufacturers. During the pandemic, Bionix solidified our relationships with our U.S. manufacturing partners. That was the time we needed them most and they consistently came through for us.
Going forward, it is important to focus on risk mitigation and scenario planning, especially given the uncertainties that can arise. With U.S. manufacturing already established, we are in a good position to avoid any future potential disruption.
Baxter: Make Where You Sell and Buy Where You Make
Baxter has a global manufacturing footprint, and its U.S. presence is a critical part of the company’s integrated supply chain approach, with 18 manufacturing locations and approximately 11,000 employees at those sites across the country. Baxter’s strategy is to ‘make where you sell and buy where you make’ – an approach that drives customer satisfaction and overall efficiency.
As an example, Baxter’s Front Line Care division manufactures the majority of its products in the U.S. and includes its Skaneateles Falls, New York site, a state-of-the-art LEED Gold-certified facility with co-located engineering, manufacturing, commercial and cross-functional resources. This co-location provides a unique opportunity for close collaboration across product development project teams and facilitates the transition of design to manufacturing when preparing to launch a new product.
“Local manufacturing in the U.S. empowers us to serve our U.S. customers – we can monitor the pulse of our operations to refine production processes, productivity, and quality control,” a company representative told Repertoire. “As a company and a workforce, we are focused on our mission of Saving and Sustaining Lives and elevating patient care. Getting the right products into clinician hands as they are needed is mission critical.”
What are the benefits to your local economy and community?
For Skaneateles Falls specifically, Baxter employs approximately 850 full-time colleagues and we are one of the leading employers in Onondaga County, New York. In addition to providing career opportunities in manufacturing, product development, sales, marketing, finance, and customer support, Baxter gives back to our communities in myriad and meaningful ways:
- Generous matching gift program: In addition to giving their time through volunteering, many employees choose to donate to causes that are important to them. The Baxter International Foundation’s Matching Gift Program recognizes employee contributions to charitable organizations by matching an employee’s donation of $25 or more, up to $5,000, to nonprofit, tax-exempt U.S. organizations.
- Community engagement events: These take place throughout the year and include Earth Week cleanup days in partnership with several local organizations, supporting the annual American Heart Association Heart Walk in Syracuse, and various fundraising and support activities benefitting local organizations including the Food Bank of Central New York and Mary Nelson Youth Center.
How does this strategy benefit your customers and the end-users?
The high-quality products we have delivered for more than 90 years have built great customer loyalty, trust, and value both inside and outside the hospital. Talented teams in the U.S. are researching, developing, testing, and manufacturing products that help clinicians diagnose, monitor, and provide therapy to support patient health.
From your vantagepoint, how has the U.S. healthcare supply chain changed now that we’ve entered a post-pandemic market? How have you adapted to these changes?
COVID-19 made clear that the supply chain innovations we have implemented are essential to maintaining resiliency of our product supply. We have assessed every aspect of the supply chain ecosystem, created a plan A, B and C should unfortunate disruptions occur, and reimagined seemingly small details. This continuous practice improves our ability to deliver lifesaving and life-sustaining products to our customers and the patients they serve.
At the most basic level, visibility to where products are and when they will arrive is critical to customer satisfaction. To bring more transparency and efficiency in the transportation and logistics processes, we implemented a digital supply chain platform that improves the ability to plan, execute and adjust the physical movement of goods, while improving service. This gives us a real-time ‘Control Tower’ view of integrated data across many functions that allows us to reduce freight costs, improve lead time and increase efficiency and customer satisfaction.
B. Braun: Ensuring Reliable Supply of Life-Saving Medical Products
B. Braun has invested more than $1.2 billion in new and upgraded manufacturing facilities in the United States. The company said it is making these investments to help meet increasing patient needs and ensure the reliable supply of life-saving medical products to patients across the country by the creation of shorter and more localized supply chains.
The majority of these investments are in new and enhanced IV therapy manufacturing facilities to help ensure a reliable and consistent supply of vital IV fluids needed to hydrate patients, administer drugs, and replace lost blood volume. In recent years, the U.S. market has experienced destructive weather events, severe influenza seasons, and a global pandemic, each contributing to major nationwide shortages of these products. B. Braun’s investments in IV therapy include a new state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Daytona Beach, Florida, and significant modernizations to existing facilities in Irvine, California, and Allentown, Pennsylvania.
“We are proud to be manufacturing in the U.S. for the U.S.,” the company told Repertoire.
What are the benefits of domestic manufacturing to your local economy and community?
Investing in new and upgraded manufacturing in the U.S. represents a commitment to the communities where our employees live and work. It also brings high-tech manufacturing to the areas where we invest. We have incorporated the latest Industry 4.0 technologies into our plants to transform the way pharmaceuticals are manufactured. These are truly the plants of the future.
How does this strategy benefit your customers and the end-users?
By manufacturing in the U.S. for the U.S., we are further stream-lining the supply chain, while at the same time facilitating increased standardization to environmentally preferred products. Providers and their patients are exposed to less chemicals of concern when the IV bags they use are not made with toxic chemicals such as DEHP.
From your vantagepoint, how has the U.S. healthcare supply chain changed now that we’ve entered a post-pandemic market? How have you adapted to these changes?
The post-pandemic supply chain places even greater demands on the transparency and redundancy of our manufacturing capabilities, both locally and globally. Here at our B. Braun U.S. manufacturing sites in Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas and California, we work hard each day to produce and deliver the safest, highest quality medical devices and pharmaceuticals, through our distributor partners, to those providers and patients who are counting on us. We are constantly looking to improve our supply chain efficiencies, knowing that our med/surg distributors and drug wholesalers have high expectations of their local B. Braun sales representatives. The post-pandemic market demands that we have the redundancy in our manufacturing in order to effectively supply, each and every day, the providers in all of our key markets across the continuum of care.
DETECTO: Long-Lasting Stability
Manufacturing products in the U.S. is much more than a strategy for DETECTO, said Jonathan Sabo, Vice-President of Marketing & Customer Support. “It’s baked into the very ethos of who we are as a company.
“From the beginning, DETECTO has always been a true vertically-integrated manufacturer of medical products and our founder believed that if we could make it here at our factory in Webb City, Missouri then we would,” Sabo continued. “From the strain gauges in the load cells of our electronic scales to our printed circuit board production to the metal fabrication and final assembly, the DETECTO factory is alive with USA-made manufacturing ingenuity and hard work every day.”
Sabo said this benefits DETECTO in many ways; primarily, that they can control their own destiny when it comes to supply chain, since they control a large percent of it internally. “This especially became critical during COVID when we controlled a larger piece of the pie in our parts and production cycle than many others and could react quicker and more nimbly in helping our medical customers.”
Sabo spoke more about the benefits of domestic manufacturing with Repertoire:
What are the benefits to your local economy and community?
The benefits of being USA-made has many advantages to our local community here at DETECTO. The company has a positive impact on southwest Missouri in that we employ well-paying, long-lasting jobs that are stable and allow our employees to work with customers on a global stage. The manufacturing industry is fairly stable compared to many other sectors, and especially scale manufacturing itself doesn’t have the crashing highs and lows of other industries that are significantly impacted by outside economic influences.
The need never ends for medical scales, mobile storage carts, waste receptacles, and stadiometers that we manufacture, so that provides permanent, healthy jobs for our local economy. But the advantage isn’t only for our employees and community, DETECTO benefits as well from the honest, hard-working Midwestern work ethic seen in our staff every day who truly care about making quality products and putting in a hard day’s work.
How does this strategy benefit your customers and the end-users?
We’ve found that customers do definitely appreciate USA-made goods and are willing to pay a slight premium for them, inside the U.S. especially, but also overseas. Many of our international distributors in the Middle East, Latin America, and southeast Asia have sought us out due to our factory being in Webb City, Missouri that is ISO quality controlled and VCAP certified. They know we control a large percent of our supply chain and production process internally, so that allows us to monitor production quality and ensure the best product for our customers, so our distributors aren’t constantly chasing return issues.
From your vantagepoint, how has the U.S. healthcare supply chain changed now that we’ve entered a post-pandemic market? How have you adapted to these changes?
Speed and consolidation are the two biggest areas we’ve seen shifting in the post-pandemic world. We have changed our production planning and business model in recent years to better help our customers by having more finished goods on our warehouse shelves, so that we can quick-ship next day. This has become an expectation in the Amazon era we live in now that when an order is placed it will ship out right away, whether it is one of our medical scales, carts, waste receptacles, or stadiometers.
We’ve reacted to this market need by shifting our model to build up more inventory boxed and setting on warehouse shelves than ever before in the history of our company. We’ve also seen a consolidation in the healthcare industry with many of our smaller distributors being bought up by larger players, so our distributor list size has decreased in recent years with less dealers, and more emphasis geared towards the bigger organizations.
Midmark Corporation: A Higher Degree of Quality
Midmark Corporation (formerly the Cummings Machine Company) was founded in 1915 in Minster, Ohio, as a manufacturer of concrete mixers using the patents owned by the company’s president at the time, EC Cummings. Fast forward 109 years, Midmark now has seven manufacturing locations within the United States.
Manufacturing in the United States has several advantages for Midmark and its customers including supply chain benefits, higher quality and access to jobs for employees in the local communities, said Tracy Timmerman, Senior Marketing Manager, Midmark Corporation.
“By manufacturing products in the United States, there is a higher degree of quality control and response times are faster if issues occur,” said Timmerman. “By manufacturing products in the United States, we’re also saving time in the production process as products don’t have to travel as far to reach distributors which means they can reach customers quicker. Ultimately, this shortens lead times and provides stability our customers deserve, especially after the last few years post pandemic.”
Timmerman discussed several items related to domestic manufacturing with Repertoire:
What are the benefits to the local economy and community?
Midmark is passionate about manufacturing products in the United States as it creates more jobs for Americans, and we take pride in supporting the economy, our local communities, and our country. It’s invaluable to be able to help Americans financially which, in turn, stimulates the economy.
How does this strategy benefit your customers and the end-users?
It’s important to our customers that Midmark manufacture in the United States, therefore, we strive to meet that need. This provides additional transparency and accountability to our customers, and they know they can count on us to be responsive and authentic.
From your vantagepoint, how has the U.S. healthcare supply chain changed now that we’ve entered a post-pandemic market? How have you adapted to these changes?
The pandemic disrupted the supply chain in an unprecedented way, and weaknesses were exposed across the global supply chain. The environment is still stabilizing, but supply chains need to be more flexible, agile and resilient than ever before.
Midmark adapted to the changing environment to best serve our customers. Increasing inventory of critical components, forecasting further out and dual sourcing are just a few considerations to boost supply-chain resiliency. I don’t believe the work stops there though – we must stay vigilant. Since change is constant, its crucial to analyze the dynamic economy and customer needs to incorporate agility into manufacturing processes.