Shift your business perspective through a job’s-based approach.
The medical product supply and manufacturing company Dukal recently went through the process of rebranding with the goal of accelerating product evolution and mitigating risk in the supply chain.
Repertoire Magazine’s Scott Adams interviewed Charles Abbinanti, President of Dukal, in a podcast on using Outcome-Driven Innovation® to identify and solve for unmet needs within the healthcare industry.
Through outcome-driven approaches, Abbinanti explains how Dukal and industry leaders can employ the “Jobs-To-Be-Done Theory” to break down where the industry is now and where it needs to be heading.
The Jobs-To-Be-Done Theory asserts that health systems and customers buy a product not because they want it, but because it helps them to complete a job. For example, when people go to the hardware store, they don’t want a quarter-inch drill bit; they want the ability to drill a quarter-inch hole.
Jobs-To-Be-Done is best defined as a perspective – a new lens through which you can observe markets, customers, needs, competitors, and customer segments more insightfully. Customers are not just buyers; they also include job executors. And while technology, environments, and trends change, the Job-To-Be-Done remains the same.
Shifting your perspective through a job’s-based approach allows you to rethink your competition, uncover your customers’ jobs, identify new customer markets, and provide stability during disruption.
Uncovering your customer’s Job-To-Be-Done
The first step when beginning the outcome-driven innovation journey, said Abbinanti, is to identify the job executor. The job executor uses a product or service to get the core functional job done. They are the reason the market exists. Abbinanti recommends then identifying what job the job executor is ultimately trying to get done. Every Job-To-Be-Done requires a plan with a pre-determined set of steps, and according to Abbinanti, the formula includes discovering where the job begins and ends, the optimal flow of processes, and the identification of desired outcome statements.
“From outcome statements, determine how important the job is to the customer, and then how satisfied the customer is with the current solution.” Your goal is then to identify potential solutions and become a problem solver for your customer – how can you minimize the time it takes to complete an outcome or minimize the likelihood of a disruption?
Where the industry is headed
Dukal plans to use aspects of the Jobs-To-Be-Theory as a foundation for the company’s strategy going forward. The company launched a recent supply chain solution project, called Dukal InSightTM, using outcome-driven innovation.
By interviewing a series of manufacturers, distributors, and end users to determine how to mitigate risk in the industry, Dukal came up with a solution benefitting both the customer and the clinician. The project explored medical supply chain disruptions, specifically addressing when products are delayed or late, which leaves suppliers and distributors with no time to respond and assist for success on the clinician level.
Dukal InSight is a supply chain visibility tool that provides clarity to customer orders throughout the process of delivery from the start of the assembly line, all the way to the customer’s dock. Dukal InSight helps distributors, and their customers, have constant communication around potential disruptions. Suppliers and their customers are notified as early as months ahead of time, allowing for a trusted partnership. InSight allows Dukal to solve supply issues far in advance to solve shipping delays before they impact the job at both the distributor and clinician level.
By the end of 2024, Dukal plans to offer the InSight service for forecasted business for customers, not just existing orders, taking the risk out of the equation and allowing distributors and self-distributing health systems full visibility and transparency on the statues of their order to best serve patients.
“Delays happen, and the system allows Dukal to know about delays 60 to 90 days in advance, updating the customer with a report showing everything they ordered, the status of the shipment, where the products are located, and the new expected delivery date,” said Abbinanti. “This allows Dukal to have a conversation with the customer and figure out how it will impact them, and how we can best find a solution.”
The future of medical product innovation
Dukal has also applied outcome-driven innovation to their sector of the medical product industry. According to Abbinanti, the company assisted neurosurgeons in the New York area using the same methodology. The New York clinicians expressed to Dukal that they wanted to create better structure and better hold for spinal fusion procedures using the patient’s actual bone.
Dukal, in turn, developed a solution for clinicians, inventing a bone dust collector (Capseus BDC-15) that provides cost-effective local autograft generated at the surgical site allowing surgeons to collect any volume of locally drilled autologous bone directly at the point of suction without any additional pressing steps. The product is a new and innovative opportunity to assist the neurosurgery and orthopedic industry. According to Abbinanti, the BDC-15 is “just one example of the products that the company has developed using outcome-driven innovation on the product side.”
The company is also looking to launch other programs around minimizing risk in the medical product industry on the quality and regulatory side. The FDA just launched a new policy that all manufacturers need a new quality management system by 2026 that ensures clinical risk mitigation.
Abbinanti said, “with the FDA policies on the forefront in the industry, Dukal is consistently considering how to use outcome-driven innovation to drive growth through products and services that help us mitigate risk.”