Medical Product Outsourcing VS. In-House Manufacturing

Deciding on whether to outsource 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.

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

It goes without saying that setting up your own medical device manufacturing facility and operations, will have a significant impact on your product’s time to market. On the contrary, outsourcing is clearly a quicker path to bring your products to market.

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, simply 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 products in-house manufacture is considered the de-facto choice when it comes to IP protection, since sourcing to an external partner would require the revealing of manufacturing trade secrets. However this argument is null when it comes to reputable contract manufacturers. For one, your IP is protected through your own registered patents. Secondly, IP protection is explicitly covered in your contract NDA. So when you think of it from a serious contract manufacturer’s perspective, breaching that NDA makes no sense since it would result in legal liability, reputation damage, and other negative implications.

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.

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.