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Acumed appointed Robert Johnson as president in September 2013. BONEZONE spoke to him about manufacturing improvements and his new leadership role.
BONEZONE: While you served as Vice President of Operations and New Product Development, Acumed was recognized for operational excellence. How did Acumed improve its manufacturing and operations processes? What advice do you have on maintaining continual improvement?
Robert Johnson: We were honored to be a recipient of both the AME and ML100 award, but the result of improvement within any organization needs to be more than a finished project or an award. Improvement must be measureable, and it must improve the performance of the business. At Acumed, over the past five years, we’ve drastically cut our lead times, our delivery variability and cost. However, we are most proud of our improvements in quality. We established and maintained a culture throughout our operations team that delivers consistent, incremental improvement through collaboration and personal ownership. The steps to achieve this are simple to outline, but can be challenging to implement:
- Be a leader who demands excellence from your team after you are demonstrating it yourself.
- Determine what matters in your business and decide how to measure it.
- Set numeric, time based goals that establish what success means in those areas, and assign owners.
- Help those owners to build and engage small teams of employees who care, and are directly involved in the process of achieving those metrics.
- Challenge the leaders and teams to do things they don’t think are possible.
- Support their efforts by eliminating obstacles, providing clear direction and encouragement.
- Hold them accountable for the results, good or bad, in a consistent and fair way.
It was important to have a clear vision of what success would look like, such as driving lead-time to an X-theoretical target, and then engaging the entire operations workforce to work on improvement projects, small and large, that would have immediate and sustained results. Sharing the success for any project that moved us forward was an important way to make everyone feel good about how they contributed. Be systematic.
BONEZONE: What are you most looking forward to in your new role as president?
Johnson: I enjoy the process of building and being a part of a great team, and challenging us as a group to exceed expectations. I like to be challenged and to deliver exceptional results in innovative ways. We are fortunate because Acumed is a company with great people doing outstanding work that we enjoy being a part of. As president, I have the opportunity to do these things on a much larger scale and spread the Lean implementation to all areas of the business. That engages me, and I’m excited to see the great results we’re poised to deliver.
BONEZONE: Where do you see the orthopaedic industry in five years?
Johnson: The industry will consolidate in non-differentiated products, but great, innovative solutions will continue to be rewarded. For many products, the total value of the product will relate more to the ease of use, cost of delivery and the quality of service provided rather than the relationships that our business was traditionally built upon. Relationships have been and will always be part of this business, but as the pressures increase on outcomes, quantifiable patient results will become more and more critical when justifying the use of orthopaedic products. At Acumed, we recognize that this industry will continue to grow, but the environment that our customer lives within is changing dramatically. We need to partner with them to navigate this shifting environment, providing outstanding results for patients, and consistently greater value to those who deliver the care. Finally, competitive pressures will increase at a faster pace than the market will grow, so success will only come to those companies that are able to innovate while improving their efficiencies.
BONEZONE: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Johnson: My dad was a hardworking railroader in the rural Midwest, so I have to paraphrase a little here as he used a lot of salty language. His advice/requirement was, “Don’t ‘give’ up! While others start ‘giving’ up, dig in without complaining until the job is done.”
BONEZONE: What was one of your greater challenges? How did you overcome it?
Johnson: After 25 years in the semiconductor industry running 365 manufacturing, I switched careers into the medical device industry. The company was caught in a decision-making situation of whether to do more of its own internal manufacturing or keep outsourcing 90 percent of the product build. All metrics (lead-time, throughput, COGs, QN%, systems, etc.) pointed toward the company running in R&D mode. The challenge was ramping up the factory significantly and starting a second factory while implementing lean systems and SPC that were completely foreign to 95 percent of the employees. To overcome the many obstacles, I started by introducing goals to all of the floor supervisors and took daily note of anyone who showed even the slightest interest. After a few months of being relentless, we started to overcome inertia and the momentum picked up unbelievably toward continuous process improvement. Now, after six years, it is self-sustaining and ingrained in the company culture.
