Medical Product Outsourcing VS. In-House Manufacturing

Deciding on whether to find a medical product outsourcing partner or set up your own medical device manufacturing operations is critical to your business’s bottom line. This choice will affect almost every aspect of your activities, from sales and logistics, to cost of revenues. In this article, we present the key differences between the two, highlight some lesser known truths about medical device product outsourcing, and demonstrate how to best utilize it’s advantages.

Key Differences of Medical Product Outsourcing VS In-House Manufacturing

Company Focus

Manufacturing in-house will require you undertaking a several added operations, on top of your existing activities. Outsourcing medical product manufacturing enables your company to maintain its focus on its core strengths such as innovation, R&D, market research, and sales.

Working with the right manufacturing outsourcing partner can let you take advantage of their unique experience and infrastructure rather than trying to develop those resources within your own organization. When you have a specific need in a manufacturing project, outsourcing can provide precisely what you need.

You may not currently be equipped for certain manufacturing requirements, and outsourcing provides a more efficient solution than developing new core competencies within your organization. Quasar, for example, implements complex micro-assembly into its production lines. This requires specialized equipment and systems alongside skilled production line operators and other staff.

Acquiring this type of specialized equipment for a single product or even multiple products is unlikely to be cost-effective. Hiring, training, and other employment-related costs can push your project even further into the red. By relying on outsourcing, you don’t have to worry about the balance of these costs and can instead let your manufacturing partner handle everything.

When a new device introduces challenges that your organization doesn’t have the solutions for, outsourcing can open up new possibilities. By working with Quasar as your manufacturing partner, you can take advantage of state-of-the-art manufacturing technology to expand your capabilities to include more specialized and intricate medical devices and components.

Quality Control

In-house manufacturing can result in a higher ability to supervise quality control, since you will be responsible for any and all production operations. However ability does not equal efficiency. An experienced outsourcing partner employs seasoned personnel, specialized in medical product manufacturing, and operates under optimized processes that are proven to work.

Time to Market

Time to market is one of the most significant criteria for any medical device manufacturing operation to meet. Your organization needs to be able to react quickly to shifts in demand, as the devices included in incoming work orders are often of an incredibly time-sensitive nature. Responses to epidemics, natural disasters, and other events that call for an increase in medical supplies must be as swift as possible.

Even in non-critical scenarios, your buyers will prioritize vendors that can provide a faster time to market. There’s no reason why they would choose the slower vendor if all else is equal, so your organization must maintain a fast time to market if you’re going to remain competitive.

Attempting to establish new internal manufacturing operations or modify existing infrastructure for new production is not a fast process. It is time-consuming and resource-intensive. If your organization isn’t experienced in these types of rapid deployments and transitions, you may find yourself stumbling through the process with delay after delay.

Outsourcing is the quicker path to bringing new products to market.

Quasar’s extensive product deployment experience, our human and technological resources can rapidly launch your new production processes. You can achieve a faster time to market for your medical devices and components with outsourcing’s increased flexibility and capabilities.

Flexibility & Adaptation

In-house manufacturing is often considered to offer more flexibility to adapt to changes – on the basis that less overhead is required when rolling out changes internally, than having to communicate them to an outsourcing partner. However this is not the case with all partnerships. An experienced contract manufacturer has unmatched flexibility to change and iterate, due to their vast amount of infrastructure and know-how. For those same reasons, a proper outsourcing partner is better equipped to handle changes in quantities, servicing both small and large production runs.

IP protection

Medical device producers commit significant resources to the development and improvement of medical device design. The valuable IPs they develop must be protected, so organizations must choose their partners carefully. The serious medical device manufacturers will have the proper protections in place to safeguard your IP.

The control of proprietary design information and data can be closely controlled within a partnered organization to prevent any breaches. When working with Quasar, the team that handles this information is limited in scale and is comprised of core engineers with the highest clearance.

The implementation of manufacturing processes to produce your medical devices and components is accomplished in a way that distances individuals from proprietary information. Several select individuals are aware of the entire project scope due to dispersion of components and processes across different departments.

Of course, your IP is also protected by a rigorous NDA agreement. At Quasar, additional measures are implemented to prevent NDA breaches from occurring rather than deal with them afterward.

Cost Considerations

It doesn’t take much to realize that in-house manufacturing requires a significantly larger investment in equipment, personnel acquisition and training, compared to outsourcing. Moreover, even though in-house offers greater control over production costs, outsourcing can result in reduced cost of revenues, due to the economies of scale that larger contract manufacturers can have.

Medical Product Outsourcing: Finding the Right Outsourcing Partner

By now it should be clear that all contract manufacturers aren’t created equal. It’s therefore evident that choosing the right partner can mitigate most risks associated with outsourcing manufacturing of medical products. 

Your Trusted Contract Manufacturing Partner

Quasar has supported medical device OEMs achieve their goals for over 30 years. Having amassed an enormous amount of experience and know how, coupled with our modern production facilities and specialized personnel, we can help you achieve your OEM medical device goals. Contact us to discover how Quasar can become your trusted contract manufacturing partner.