Medical device companies gain a competitive edge using big data

Medical device companies realize that smart manufacturing is the fastest way to achieve operational excellence in today’s global marketplace. With current world conditions adversely impacting markets and exerting unprecedented pressures on medical device manufacturers, the journey towards smart manufacturing is essential to remain competitive. Accelerating product innovation while at the same time controlling product performance has never been more important.

To succeed in this competitive, complex and individualized market, medical device companies must leverage IoT to pair big data analytics with manufacturing and global supply chains with design and development processes across the entire value chain.

Siemens’ IoT solutions for the medical device industry are powered by combining big data with a comprehensive digital twin, or a virtual representation of actual devices, moving in tandem across the lifecycle and connected by digital threads. By connecting virtual development and production planning environments with real support and lifecycle production data, Siemens is equipping med-tech organizations with the transparency and advance analytic tools required to gain a competitive edge using big data.

The process of gathering, standardizing and contextualizing real-time manufacturing data across all participants in the supply chain can enable automated validation of production equipment and processes as well as improve the understanding of production quality that can be linked to other tools to improve and control manufacturing operations. Data can then provide feedback to the design and engineering departments to improve product quality. Eliminating manual DHR activities will improve resource utilization and remove errors.  This contextualized data can help operations teams drive toward closed-loop manufacturing to lower costs while ensuring product performance.

Achieving operational excellence requires a cultural shift in how data is shared across medical device organizations. Improving the underlying infrastructure can simplify this transition. A big part of this lies in removing the focus on managing documents to contextualizing the data used to automatically generate documents. This shift will improve agility, produce consistent product quality and factory efficiency while still ensuring safety and compliance as you’re able to adjust to the environment and stay innovative and competitive in the medical device market.

Here’s a quick video addressing execution and IIoT in Medical Device manufacturing.