Assembly Costs Can Be a Significant Portion of Your Medical Device Development

According to Precedence Research, medical device companies worldwide spent $53.71 billion on contract manufacturing in 2019 – and are expected to spend $97.52 billion annually by 2027. No doubt you’re constantly examining your company’s development costs, looking for ways to become more efficient.

Underestimating Assembly Costs

It’s easy, especially in the planning stages, to underestimate manufacturing and assembly costs. It’s natural to focus on the price of the components and assume that’s going to be the bulk of your expenses. However, you also need to consider labor costs to assemble those components, the fixed costs of the manufacturing space and utilities, as well as the cost of the rest of your design and management team. These overhead charges often exceed the price of the individual components themselves.

It’s also important to look at the efficiency of your entire assembly process. There may be some processes that you’re currently doing in-house that might be cheaper to outsource. Conversely, you may be outsourcing some sub-assembly that, in the long run, might be cheaper to recreate in-house.

Determining the Cost of Quality

When selecting suppliers for your component parts, it’s important to consider the quality of those parts. One supplier may charge less than another for a given part but provide substandard quality. If lower-cost components result in a higher failure rate, your overall costs may increase. Sometimes it’s worth paying more upfront to a higher-quality vendor than suffer a high failure or returns rate.

This is especially important with medical devices that must meet high standards of quality. You may need to invest in specialized testing equipment to ensure the end quality of both component parts and the final device.

Improving Design to Value

In the medical field, it’s common to focus on the technical capabilities of a device while ignoring the cost of including those capabilities. More successful companies recognize that they also need to focus on keeping costs as low as possible to deliver not just functionality but also value to their customers. This approach is called maximizing design to value (DTV) and requires companies to reduce costs while maintaining quality and functionality.

Let Thermal International Press Review Your Plastic Assembly Processes

Thermal Press has been a leader in thermal assembly technology for almost 50 years. Let us review your planned assembly processes before issuing them to production. By reviewing market factors and your proposed assembly process, we can recommend improved and more cost-effective manufacturing and assembly processes that will deliver maximum DTV.

Tags: assembly costs, design to value, medical device assembly, medical device assembly costs, medical device development, medical device manufacturing, plastic assembly process