Vetting Your Outsourcing Partner’s Motion Control Strategy

Today, more laboratory device OEMs in the life sciences are realizing that they don’t have the technical staffing to support motion control R&D or they’ve determined their real opportunity is in producing the consumables their customers require rather than the instrumentation. That leads them to outsourcing as much of the instrumentation design as they can. Here are six key questions you need to ask potential partners and have them answer before making that outsourcing decision.

1. Do you have a stage-gate process?
A stage-gate process outlines and defines the steps (with deliverables) required during each project stage. Separating each stage is a gate indicating successful completion of each landmark, followed by a management review to verify that all deliverables are complete before making the critical go or no-go decision advancing the project to the next stage. An effective stage-gate process is structured to smooth out project turbulence. Any outsourcing partner’s stage-gate process should be standardized and implemented across many sites, subject to constant improvement as part of a continuous improvement culture. It calls for collaboration between project managers on the OEM and vendor sides.

2. Do you use trained program managers or project managers to run your development projects?
In instrument development, plans will change. Therefore, good project management that can deal with challenges that plans could not foresee is indispensable. A service provider should assign a project manager to each OEM development project as early as possible to guarantee they are exposed to both the commercial and technical client details.

3. What is your quality management system and how will it ensure a low RPPM (return parts per million)?
A robust advanced product quality planning process should include failure mode effects analysis, process failure mode effects analysis, and control plans. Engineering managers, quality managers, and advanced manufacturing managers should be well schooled in Six Sigma practices to reduce variability and ensure that both the product and the process are robust.

4. Do you have a process to manage your design efforts to meet a target cost?
Quality function deployment is a methodology to turn qualitative user demands into quantitative engineering requirements. Versions of the methodology include an extension into value engineering, whereby a value (or target cost) can be arrived at for each subsystems of a device or instrument. Whether the design is being completed by an in-house team or through an outside partner, this value engineering matrix becomes one of the key design review tools allowing project management and systems engineering to monitor the impact that design decisions are having on cost. This allows for meaningful discussion and decision making relative to cost and performance of the key subsystems.

5. What is your long-term production strategy and how will you ramp up to production volumes?
Some outsourcing candidates can offer the ability to manufacture anywhere in the world where their customer is going to end up wanting to manufacture. This lets them get fairly local, which makes for a lean supply chain. That supply chain can be leveraged based on the volumes the OEM generates to make good use of local talent wherever that OEM has a presence.

6. Do you have a culture of continuous improvement? 
The opportunities for lean improvement extend well beyond the plant floor and into the office and support functions of organizations all over the world. If bound by the separation of the “concrete floor” and the “carpet floor” much of the opportunity for improvement and waste reduction are not available. Organizations with engaged employees who are empowered to make decisions at their level yet understand enterprise functionality will be the most effective.




Brian Handerhan is a business development manager focusing on Parker’s Life Science Automation group. He has more than 20 years of experience in the implementation of automation across a broad range of industries. His primary expertise has been as a process improvement leader, change agent, and P&L (profit and loss) owner. He now focuses that broad experience on working with industry OEMs to develop lasting business relationships built on both operational and technical value. For more information, visit Parker Hannifin Corporation Electromechanical Division N.A. at www.parkermotion.com.