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Stay sharp, stay ahead – navigating supply chains in tricky times

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Krissi Heard-Slagle from tubing specialist MicroLumen speaks to Med-Tech Innovation News about navigating supply chains amid disruption and its product offerings. 

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The past few years has seen many manufacturers experience disruption in their supply chains – it may have been sparked by COVID-19 and multiple lockdowns, but any subsequent backlogs illustrated by cargo ships waiting at ports and the geopolitical situation – such as Russia’s war in Ukraine – means these have continued and may continue for some time.

MicroLumen may have had things better than most at the start of the pandemic as the Florida-based tubing specialist manages to source its raw materials locally.

There are four notable products in MicroLumen’s offering: 

Krissi Heard-Slagle, technical sales at MicroLumen, offered some insight as to who the company works with, describing their customers as the ‘heavy hitters’ of the industry.

“We sell to multiple industries within the medical industry. Some of these big companies have an orthopaedic division, a neuro division, cardiovascular. I would say the majority of our products go into cardiovascular type procedures and that could be anything like a blockage where we would go in and remove a blockage and then a stent would be inserted.”

Heard-Slagle also mentioned the work the company does with those who are looking to help prevent strokes.

Polyimide was MicroLumen’s main product line when the company started manufacturing tubing – a thermoset plastic which goes under the trade name Capton.

Explaining more about how it’s made, Heard-Slagle said: “Polyimide starts as a plastic, like a liquid and then we cure it into a solid.

“We kind of use a core tooling and it goes to a cycle of dips, which is proprietary. We can control the idea of that tube due to our process versus extrusions.

“Our tubes are predominantly used like a guide lumen and then, the innards could be several other tubes of various plastics doing different functions, like one could be a guide wire. One could be a channel where they're pushing saline. Another could be where they're sucking out material and catching it – so they don't have those free particulates of plaque floating around and causing a stroke.”

The company’s reinforced offering involves adding stainless steel wires onto their tubes creating a braid to make the tubing more robust for certain procedures. Its PTFE and composite products aim to reduce friction and laser machining has been outsourced to specialists for the last two decades – there are no plans to bring that in-house as things stand. 

Supply chain concerns for business started to amass during the outbreak of COVID-19. At this point, MicroLumen felt well-placed deal with any issues coming their way.

“As things started opening up, everyone became concerned about supply chain and we weren't super concerned just because most of our materials that we purchased, and raw materials, are in the United States.”

As a supplier of materials for essential workers, MicroLumen remained open and manufacturing during the pandemic, and Heard-Slagle acknowledges that a spike in demand might have been down to some panic purchases.

New supply chain challenges have followed as certain nations began to return to normality as more people received COVID-19 vaccines. One area in particular where MicroLumen is seeing challenges is for its reinforced offering.

“For example, the stainless steel braid wire from the braid and coil reinforced, there's shortages and precious metals globally. So, let's say it took eight weeks to get the material in, we're seeing some lead times as long as like 20 plus weeks.”

So, how is Microlumen looking to combat these challenges?

“We’re just trying to make sure we're ahead of the game. If we know we have certain demands from our customers that we stay on top of our raw material inventories, we try to buy a little bit of a stockpile in the event there is going to be a longer lead time.”

This isn’t limited to stainless steel. Some chemical companies are having to outsource their chemicals to other countries while others are finding necessary gas in short supply – in part down to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

“Everyone's just doing the best and I think the best thing to do is we're just being very honest and upfront with our customers by asking for realistic forecast so we can also prioritise who needs what allocating. 

“Let's say we only have so much of a raw material, we have to allocate well. These are legacy parts. These are production parts that these are going straight into manufacturing and being delivered to the hospitals versus this is an R&D job where we don't know if it's going to go anywhere. You have to navigate each case by case.”

Challenging times can also bring about opportunities. MicroLumen has been working for some time, even prior to the pandemic, on how to bring down lead times with certain material. 

Summing up, Heard-Slagle said: “One of our materials that we manufacture we have to process it in a manner that uses chemicals, and we don't do it in-house. It's just not something that it's dirty, it's bad for the environment. It's not something that we couldn't control the lead times or the quality.

“Throughout the years, we've started dabbling and making that process in house so we can control the lead times we can control the quality, we can be cleaner about it. That's just one thing that we did, but that wasn't even because of COVID. That was just out of necessity and growth.

“We're also looking at if we had two suppliers for a particular item and let's say the lead time is 30 something weeks, we're looking at if a different plastic or a different component can solve the same problem but reducing lead time. These are conversations we have to have with our customers and with the engineers and regulatory - just to make sure that we try to stay smart, stay sharp, stay ahead. We don't really know what the future holds.”

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