Meditech

Meditech

1. What are Meditech’s problems in introducing new products? In manufacturing ALL products?

The main difficulty Meditech Faces when introducing a new product is a constant failureto fulfill initial orders; some customers may have to wait up to 6 weeks to have their orders delivered.

The main problem in manufacturing all products is an excessive lead time to ordercomponents parts which generates significant delays on delivering customers’ demand. The manufacturing process is divided in three steps: assembly, packaging and sterilization; the time to assembly a batchof orders takes only two weeks while the lead time for component parts is very unpredictable ranging from two to sixteen weeks. Packaging and sterilization processes have no capacity problems and bothprocesses are completed in 1 week.

2. What is driving these problems, both systemically and organizationally?

Systematic drivers are associated with standardized, methodical, fixedprocesses (related to individuals) while Organizational drivers are linked to the structure of an organization, including how activities and events are planned and arranged (they relate to organizationsrather than individuals).

I. Problems in introducing new products:
Systematic drivers:
* Lack of planning when introducing new products into the market creates inventory misbalances: inabilityto forecast new products "bubble" demand generates shortfalls during the launch and excess inventory after "Panic" orders from customers.

Organizational drivers:
* There is an enormous desireto innovate and constantly update existing products without the right pace and pipeline methodology to increase process capacity to fulfill orders.
* Maintaining high inventory levels ofexisting products reduces the capacity to increase production of new products.
* A decentralized regional warehouse is unable to track and predict individual warehouse orders.

II. Problems in...