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Leading with Quality: The Key to Establishing Successful Partnerships Between OEMs and Contract Manufacturers

When working with a contract manufacturer to create a component or assembly that your company will depend on, it is critically important to align on the deliverables, expectations, and timeline. A single misstep in the process or a misunderstanding of design intent can create delays or quality issues that derail a major project. How can you prevent these challenges and avoid the pitfalls? Lead with quality.

Setting the Stage

The cycle of contract manufacturing involves multiple partnerships and several key audiences that must work together to deliver the best possible outcomes.

• The primary partnership between customers and suppliers
• Internal partnerships at the customer organization among quality, engineering, and supply chain professionals
• Internal partnerships at suppliers among sales, engineering, quality, and sub-tier suppliers

The primary partnership is obvious and where most of the attention often lies. Ideally, though, the opportunity exists to cultivate a deep and more engaged partnership by working to connect peers and their counterparts across both organizations.

Internal relationships may be overlooked from time to time. Within your organization, is there a clear and shared understanding of how the part being manufactured will be used when initiating a new project? Have you identified and marked the limits of design flexibility? Do you agree on critical features compared to secondary or non-critical features? Communicating these details and gaining support from your full team allows the contract manufacturing partner to create the most efficient and effective plan for you.

For manufacturers, having the project goals and expectations clearly defined simplifies the process and reduces the risk of in-process issues and changes that can come from the internal customer team late in the game.

When and Why?

Communication is key in any relationship, and creating a strong relationship with your contract manufacturer is no different. Getting the best from them involves working as a team and allowing their experience and expertise to add to your internal knowledge.

Involving your manufacturing partner early in the product development process offers the opportunity to collaborate on final details. A structured collaboration and partnership from the beginning allows both teams to ask questions such as:

• What is the ultimate outcome you want from this project?
• Have you done similar projects in the past, and what were the lessons learned?
• Is time the most important driver, or is it a clean inspection or cost?
• Why is this dimension critical? What does this part interact with?
• What is the inspection process? What are the methods and who is responsible for each step? How do you reach agreement on what “good” is?
• What changes, if any, are possible? What stage is this project in?

With earlier involvement from everyone on the customer and manufacturer teams, there is increased stability within the process that drives efficiency and greater creativity in development of the production plan. Manufacturers bring decades of added experience. Working collaboratively with them offers customer organizations external expertise and knowledge from other leading companies in the medical device industry.

Benefits and Outcomes

What’s the payoff of leading with quality and alignment? Working effectively as a unified team can transform your quality and manufacturing efforts. Partnerships based on collaboration and trust will impact and improve every future project done with your contract manufacturer.

In addition to the relationship benefits, you can realize other highly valuable outcomes:

• First-time quality. With inspection alignment and well-communicated design intent, the contract manufacturer can engineer a manufacturing solution to meet and exceed customer expectations.
• Reduced turnaround and delivery time. No time is lost waiting for revised prints, models, or inspection requirements. Aligning from the start eliminates the back-and-forth conversation once an order has been issued.
• Reduced inspection time. Inspection can be time consuming for both the contract manufacturer and customer. Starting with a quality-led objective can result in inspection data-sharing programs, dock-to-stock initiatives and more to reduce or eliminate inspection time needed at the customer.
• Bottom-line savings. Efficiency translates to less direct manufacturing costs that save money within your budget.
• Ensure launch deadlines are met. One of the greatest concerns of any customer is meeting the timeline established for completion. When a product launch is at stake, the last thing anyone wants is a costly and embarrassing delay.

In Summary

Effectively implementing quality-led strategy requires a team approach to every customer project. Working together takes a small amount of organization on the front end, but it pays off dramatically in reduced errors, increased productivity, and less stress along the way for everyone involved.

Leading with quality is not a quality-only objective. A successful partnership is forged when engineering, supply chain, and sales focus on aligning expectations, needs, and ideas. By looking at the process as an opportunity to create, innovate, and partner, everyone becomes stronger in their roles and will share in a successful project.

Connect with Lowell

Our commitment to quality and streamlining your manufacturing has been our goal for sixty years. If you have questions on ways to improve your manufacturing and quality processes, contact us to review your current projects and learn more about how we can help you deliver your project on schedule.

Email: mackenzie.nermyr@lowellinc.com
Phone: 320-266-2212

About the Author

Mackenzie Nermyr is a Sales Engineer with Lowell, Inc. Prior to joining Lowell, Inc. in 2023, Mackenzie was a Sr. Quality Engineer with Medtronic and earned her bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from the University of Minnesota. Her background in quality engineering underscores her understanding and capability to lead with quality in the world of contract manufacturing.

Email: mackenzie.nermyr@lowellinc.com
Phone: 320-266-2212