Jabil Adds Class 100K Clean Room for Rapid Prototyping

Jabil Circuit Inc. has opened a class 100,000 clean room for rapid prototyping of medical devices. Located at the company’s St. Petersburg, Fla., headquarters, the expanded clean room facility will bring design and prototyping under one roof, which, according to company officials, will help customers accelerate time to market with new concepts.

In addition, the clean room provides technology capabilities and standard operating procedures that mirror a full-production environment, which can help to simplify the transition to higher volume manufacturing.

“Customers are asking for more development work, so this became a necessity,” Gaet Tyranski, business unit director for Jabil Healthcare & Life Sciences, told Medical Product Outsourcing. He said the company’s U.S.-based, single-use device design, engineering and prototyping services now are centralized for efficiency and customer convenience.The facility also means that designs no longer have to be shipped to another Jabil facility to create product samples.

“We carefully designed our clean room to be a mini factory with the same assembly capabilities and processes used in manufacturing plants,” he added. “That way, device companies can reduce costs, save time and achieve and optimized, production-ready, repeatable design.”

The new clean room offers ultrasonic welding, ultraviolet curing, solvent bonding, over-molding, laminate airflow, bag and blister packaging and testing.

“Our customers must see us as an extension of their business,” said Alan Myers, Jabil’s newly named vice president, Global Business Units, Healthcare & Life Sciences. “We think like a medtech company—we have to act and operate as if we were on the OEM side of the business. Part of that is the constant improvement of quality and investment in our infrastructure and people.”

At present, most of Jabil’s medical device manufacturing of single-use devices is in Asia. The company, however, plans to expand geographically in the United States and Europe to be closer to its base of OEM customers, Tyranski said.