Manufacturing technology
years could become obsolete in one. “If you’re lucky, you have six months to put the manufacturing process in place for it,” McClannon explains. “Even if you wanted to automate that, it doesn’t make sense to because the phone isn’t going to be around long enough to give you any return on your investment.” As the process required to manufacture ever more sophisticated consumer electronics migrated from an automated business in western European high-cost countries to a manual process in countries with low labour costs, McClannon says contract manufacturers looked to the medical device industry as an alternative market. “What product category lends itself to automation and has the longevity and the volume that would justify manufacturing it in western Europe or the US? Medical devices.”
A reason to automate There’s a lesson to be learned from contract manufacturers’ pivot to producing medical devices, and it’s about the limitations, as well as the advantages, of automation. Although the technology behind it has improved, the reasons behind pursuing it have not. The three big reasons are safety, quality and cost, with the last one often the main driver. “The decision to automate or not, if you’re trying to cut cost, still comes down to product volume, longevity and complexity,” says McClannon. “If you’ve got decent volume, the product is going to be around for a reasonable period of time and it’s not too complex, you can get a good return on your investment.” Despite all of the shiny new technology powering automated production lines and the constant buzz around what’s often called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Industry 4.0 – the same challenges that existed 25 years ago are still barriers today. “We make the electronics for a lot of medical devices, and our electronic production factories have automated lines for producing the PCB assembly,” says McClannon. “But putting something like a defibrillator together or a diagnostic testing machine is still very manual.” It’s not that automating this part of the process would be impossible, the technology is certainly there to enable it. But there must be an economic reason to do so. “The volume of these products doesn’t justify putting automation in place, and neither does the complexity of their assembly,” says McClannon. On the other hand, products with fewer parts, like those in Jabil’s drug delivery devices business are still being produced based on cost-benefit decisions made more than more than a decade ago. “We have one automated product in one of our sites in Ireland that’s been running for 22 years,” says McClannon. “I can’t think of another product category that would run for that long. Coca Cola maybe?”
Medical Device Developments /
www.nsmedicaldevices.com Scalability
This sort of consistency is ideal for a product that needs to be the same every time to ensure there’s a low risk to patients. The longevity of an automation line can present its own problems, however, as the parts required to maintain it improve and become more sophisticated. In the context of that 22-year product line run by Jabil, McClannon explains: “Computer hardware 20 years ago is completely different to what it is now. You’d have more in your mobile phone now than in a desktop PC from 20 years ago. So, how you maintain the [automation] equipment and controls is very important. You don’t want to end up on eBay looking for antique spare parts.”
“I’ve been working on fully automated production lines for 25 years, so for me there was no ‘before automation’. The automation has evolved over that time, but the principles of high-volume automatic production are still the same as they were when I started.”
Another challenge in the pursuit of bringing a product to market is planning the scale of output required to meet demand. It requires a prediction of what the peak capacity is going to be before the product is launched, before a company has any idea if it’s going to get regulatory approval and before it has any feel for market acceptance. After that, it’s a contract manufacturer like Jabil that will build the capability to produce it. “In the early years, as you’re ramping up that capacity, your line is somewhat under utilised,” says McClannon. “Then you get to your sweet spot in the middle, where the line is the right size and it’s giving the right quality and cost savings.” The last phase of a product life cycle is its end of life, where demand is significantly reduced. It’s within the first and last phases that scalable automation is desirable. But adjusting a process to scale output up and down is easier said than done in a fixed automation system and requires engineering adjustments that carry their own cost. For Jabil’s automated line that’s been running 22 years, the product it continues to churn out is in its end-of-life phase, and rather than scale production down on its current machinery, McClannon says the company is building a smaller line to replace it. “You could argue that if the automation was scalable, you could reduce the volume and wouldn’t need to buy a new line,” he says. “But after 22 years running, it’s so worn out that, due to product supply risk, we’re better off with new equipment. It’s like running a car into the ground – there comes a point where it will let you
57
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170
