Meditech Surgical Case Paper

Meditech Surgical Case Paper

Meditech has a new medical device they are trying to sell to customers while also trying to meet the demands of their current products. The company has several issues including the relationships with vendors and suppliers, distribution locations, warehouse locations and customer service department. They do not have procedures and systems in place to handle customer complaints, create reports to accurately forecast for sales; also they do not have a good relationship with their supplier. There are numerous processes and procedures that need to be implemented to aid Meditech in turning the business around and become customer friendly and profitable (Simchi-Levi, 2008).

Meditech's problem in introducing new products is they wanted to use brand naming as their marketing strategy. By using this marketing strategy Meditech thought they would be able to easily sell endoscopic medical devises. What happened was Meditech could not produce the medical equipment fast enough to meet customer demands. They also have a massive amount of orders they cannot fill, while the time to the manufacture time the medical devises continues to increase. For this reason Meditech has not been able to achieve their goal and their relationship with the customers has suffered in the process.

Throughout the company they have had poor communication with their suppliers. This was the root cause in orders not to being filled and the goods not being shipped. There is no system or policy in place to be able to forecast supply demands. Another are that needs to be improved is the customer service department. Due to the delivery problems with the medical devices, customers became angry and voiced their opinion to the customer service representatives. Meditech's customer service department is not use to handling these types of complaints and did not explain the problem to the customers very well. This department is the first line of defense and can help ease the customer's distain. One other problem identified is that Meditech's warehouses are in one location. This has caused slow delivery problems in getting the products to their customers (Simchi-Levi, 2008).

Meditech also does not have a system in place that can create reports, record, and track any of customer information. By not having a system in place for customer data Meditech could not accurately forecast what their customer demands would be. The product production schedule did not give information as to when the product would be available or how soon it could be shipped. They continue to have poor communication with their supplier and goods were being shipped anywhere from two to twelve weeks just to ship in the United States and longer if the product was shipped overseas. Poor communication with the suppliers caused Meditech to have poor communication with their customers (Simchi-Levi, 2008).

The customer service manager was the first to realize that Meditech had major issues because all the customer complaints came in to that department. By reviewing all the complaints the manager could see what types of complaints the customers had. The manager went to the hospital where the complaints were coming from and was able to