Medela is a global healthcare company specializing in medical vacuum technologies, and well known for its breast pumps and hospital-grade suction devices. With production partners across continents, maintaining consistent test quality and visibility is critical to Medela’s success. As Medela transitioned to WATS, we wanted to shed some light on how the solution is helping them to achieve their goals.
”WATS has been an integral part of our digital transformation journey within our test environment, and the solution supported Medela in continuing to deliver quality medical devices while driving operational excellence and innovation.
Gaetano Calabrese, Industrialization Engineer, Medela
The Challenges: Fragmented and out-dated data
Medela’s production engineering teams are responsible for developing end-of-line testing and ensuring risk-based approaches to producing secure and reliable medical devices. Ensuring the safety and reliability of products is critical for a Medtech provider like Medela. The team faced numerous challenges, including difficulties in data collection, analysis, and tracking. Disparate and un-integrated data sources made it difficult to uncover trends, historical data, and the root causes of complaints, making it time-consuming, expensive, and unreliable to effectively collect and monitor data.
The need to collect, analyze and visualize test data in real-time to optimize production engineering and ensure overall quality was vital and their previous system could not provide that so Medela looked for a new solution.
The Solution: Real-time Data and proactive problem solving
With WATS, Medela has moved to fully digitize and visualize its data in real-time, enabling proactive identification and prediction of issues. The solution provides a unified platform to analyze production test data, eliminating the need for manual data collection and connecting siloed sources.
WATS is integrated with existing systems, such as the production database, and statistical tools like Minitab and TestStand. These integrations have facilitated data alignment, improved training and learning, and increased the value derived from the data collected.
The Results: Better collaboration, Informed Decisions and increased Yield
The implementation of WATS brought numerous benefits to Medela’s production engineering teams. With WATS, Medela gained full visibility into their production processes, enabling them to identify trends, track historical data, and improve overall yield and throughput. The solution also improved collaboration and knowledge sharing between teams, fostering a data-driven culture within the organization.
In addition, WATS enabled Medela to customize data displays for stakeholders, empowering them to make informed decisions. As Medela continues to expand its WATS implementation to three additional production lines, Medela remains committed to achieving greater digitization and leveraging the game-changing power of data in their high-quality medical device production.
