Medtronic Case Study: American Medical Device Summit

Upon returning from our 10th American Medical Device Summit, we spoke to Sven Schreiber, Advanced Manufacturing Engineer at Medtronic. Read below to learn more about his experience onsite and following the Summit.

To form the liaison between the R&D and Operations teams, ensuring that issues such as manufacturability, testability, supply chain concerns and limitations, sustainability, etc. are accounted for early and often in the design process. 

In a company the size of Medtronic with many specialized resources, it is very easy to get hyper focused on one's specific role, sometimes at the risk of losing sight of the bigger picture. In other words, it is easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees.

While the company provides a number of different mechanisms for widening perspectives and obtaining broader knowledge (webinars, internet forums, small group "Mixers". etc.), it is often difficult to fit these opportunities around the day-to-day activities required to do one's job. I have found myself more than once skipping a webinar because I didn't feel like I could miss a regularly schedule project meeting, and that makes it difficult to take advantage of the internal opportunities.

Attending the Medical Device Summit provides a highly rewarding couple of days away from the everyday grind to focus on industry trends, best practices and networking. The relatively short but intensely programmed nature of the Summit along with the high quality of the speakers and presentations make it easy to justify the need to skip a couple days of routine meetings in favor of a fully immersive conference experience.

One of the threads running through this year’s Summit program was the growing importance of computer-enhanced technologies ranging from augmented and virtual reality tools to machine learning and artificial intelligence. It was interesting to hear some very wide-ranging perspectives on the applications of these technologies, the challenges to their implementation and some of their potential downsides.

The wide representation of functions at the meetings, the ability to interface not only with industry colleagues but with regulators and suppliers, and the opportunities for open-ended discussion at forums such as the lunch-and-learn roundtables and networking receptions are all invaluable aspects of the Summit experience.

I have attended the Summit for quite a number of years, and I have always come away with knowledge that has increased my perspective. Outside of actual contacts that can be leveraged directly, the primary benefit of the information acquired at the Summit is for our teams to leverage the best practices shared by the presenters and to make better decisions within a wider context than we would otherwise be exposed to. This in itself has kept me coming back to the Summit year after year.

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American Aerospace & Defense Summit | December 4-5, 2023 | We-Ko-Pa Resort, Phoenix AZ

American Manufacturing Summit | March 28-29, 2024 | Westin Chicago Lombard

American Biomanufacturing Summit | April 10-11 2024 | Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport 

American Supply Chain Summit | April 30-May 1, 2024 | Hyatt Regency Dallas

American CIO & IT Summit | May 2024 

American Packaging Summit | June 18-19, 2024 | Westin Chicago Lombard 

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