With a new year quickly approaching, medical device OEMs are establishing their budgets for 2019. It’s a time when OEMs start feeling financial pressures, such as from payers of orthopedic products and services. These payers for instance, are trying to reduce health care costs, which puts constraints on how much they’re willing to pay for orthopedic products. When companies face revenue and profitability pressures, they recognize a need to cut costs.
Typically for OEM companies, the R&D part of the budget can be the first to be cut, specifically hiring more people because of its large price tag. This leaves companies asking “how do we get a new product to market with the resources we have?” They will do some projects internally, but may rely on outsourcing for the rest.
To stay ahead of the competition with innovation and speed to market, OEMs will have to get creative. That’s where Orchid Design steps in. We can help when internal resources are not available. Here are some ways that Orchid Design can help bring your products to market in the upcoming year.
Innovation and Differentiation
Often times OEMs become constrained because they utilize their resources repeatedly, to the point where their engineers are trapped in a box because they only know one way to design something. At Orchid Design our engineers are working on many orthopedic and spinal products. We have all the tools in place to rapidly create, innovate and come up with ideas that are novel and new as well as tried and true.
Reduce Product Costs
A large percentage of product cost is built into the design, not just the manufacturing process. Since we are connected to the people on the manufacturing side, we design for manufacturing and are well positioned to get costs out of design. When the products get into manufacturing, you get the benefit of low cost design and efficient manufacturing, which drives down the total cost.
Provide Expertise at All Stages
OEMs product development process typically consists of several phases which require allocating resource throughout the project. But what if they did the upfront innovation and market sensitive phases and Orchid Design picked up the project to complete the detailed Design for Manufacturing and Design Transfer? We can pick up projects at any stage, allowing OEMs to utilize their resources on their next project. Hand over your project to us and we’ll complete it, get it into manufacturing and get it to market.
Seamless Transition
Once a product is designed, it still needs to be produced. The ability to quickly turn around the manufacturing process and get it tested is critical to product development. We work with our manufacturing plants to create product and process development parallel to one another. This means we don’t just develop the product and then the process, but we develop them at the same time. This ensures quick transfers from design, manufacturing and to market.
Increased Speed to Market
One of the key elements of speed to market within product development is being able to iterate designs quickly throughout the process. This is often referred as “fail fast.” This means that you design the product, prototype and test it, and continue this rapid iterative process until it’s ready. Products can go through this cycle multiple times, making the process even longer. Orchid Design is built to iterate quickly because our design center has designing, prototyping and testing all in one place. Moving quickly through iteration allows us to fail fast, learn fast, and develop products that are ready for market faster.