Whether you’re new to the healthcare packaging industry or an industry veteran, Oliver’s most recent webinar “Shared Experiences from Healthcare Packaging Engineers” had insightful takeaways for all. Being new to the industry, I found this conversation to be very enlightening. It was personable and all panelists were very knowledgeable in their field. Here are my five top takeaways:
Another element to making the whole development process more effective when working with cross-functioning teams is to understand who you are communicating to and what they care the most about. For example, if you’re speaking to someone in quality, the conversation might lean towards complaint review and what can be done to improve. Whereas when speaking to someone in project management, they likely would care most about lead times and deadlines.
Additionally, panelists shared that learning everything they could about statistics has been critical in their roles as medical device packaging engineers. For example, Y=F(X) has been helpful in understanding how every different input impacts the output.
The medical packaging field continues to face challenges around sustainability. Currently, there isn’t much that can be recycled downstream, so the change has to start upstream. Examples of where change could take place are through implementing regulations to enforce recycling which would help to maintain costs and minimize supply constraint fears. Another approach would be to design out the waste through the initial package creation.
First and foremost, know your team—understand what drives them, their skills, and their passions. Knowing who you are working with will help immensely when assigning projects and tasks. You also want to make yourself present and available to your team. They need to know and feel comfortable coming to you with any questions or issues. Trusting your team also goes both ways. You want to trust them and feel confident that their work will be accurate. But they also need to trust you and know that if there is a concern, they can come to you for help. Lastly, your employees should understand that everything they do impacts the business.