{eBook} 5 guidelines for organizing your services operations to fully support the medical manufacturing segment

We have released our newest eBook on field service management and the medical manufacturing segment titled 5 guidelines for organizing your services operations to fully support the medical manufacturing segment. In this blog, we wanted to give you a couple of higher-order concepts around the intersection of FSM and medical manufacturing -- which will hopefully interest you further in the eBook and working within this space.

We’ll tackle this in a business case study format of ‘SWOT,’ or:

• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Opportunities
• Threats

Strengths

• Emerging Markets: One major strength here is the emergence of several markets (South America, Asia) as they develop healthier middle classes and have a need for greater medical care. There are untapped opportunities and health care providers will need someone that can service, and access data on, multiple devices as they attempt to expand into these regions.
• A wealth of client needs: This could be potentially seen as a weakness, because more of anything in business implies being overwhelmed, but there is a lot of opportunity in terms of various sectors that fall into the intersection of field service management and medical manufacturing, including hardware maintenance, repair service, and inventory control.

Weaknesses

• Government regulations: Medical manufacturing is a highly-regulated space, with compliance issues from the Food and Drug Administration, the International Standards Organization, independent auditors, and more. You need to be aware of these potential issues -- and make sure your device data is easily accessible for any compliance needs as well.
• Consolidation: As hospitals and health care providers consolidate (band together), the costs and margins on your side will come down.

Opportunities

• Emerging Markets: See above.
• Service Value: With emergent tech in field service management -- such as the rise of mobile and the Internet of Things, for example -- we can somewhat change the definition of ‘service’ from “something that occurs when a device breaks” to “how to surprise and delight a customer by fixing their issue before it even arises.” Because of consolidation and shrinking margins, the primary way to compete in the field service management-medical manufacturing space is through delivering service value. If you can capture that, it’s a massive opportunity.

Threats

• Government Regulations and Consolidation: See above.
• The Expertise Concern: Medical manufacturing is highly regulated, and how field service management intersects with it -- especially in terms of device repair, device data, and the like -- is crucial to its functioning. Many position themselves as experts on various issues in order to capture a slice of market share, but you need to be careful to only work with truly vetted experts; the results otherwise could be a disaster.

Check out our newest medical manufacturing eBook for even more information. 

Written by Julio Hartstein