The Trends Shaping Medical Device Manufacturing in 2025The Trends Shaping Medical Device Manufacturing in 2025
DELMIAWorks CMO Steve Bieszczat shares his observations on what the top trends of the year could be.
January 16, 2025
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At a Glance
- Medical device manufacturers will increase reliance on robotic and vision system automation to improve efficiency in 2025.
- Manufacturers are adopting new technologies to control costs and gain better visibility across supply chains.
- A new generation of executives is using low-code/no-code ERP tools for real-time, data-driven decision-making.
With an eye toward greater visibility and productivity across their operations, many manufacturers in the medical device industry report that they will be expanding their reliance on analytics and automated reporting in 2025. That was the overriding theme across conversations that DELMIAWorks CMO Steve Bieszczat recently had with several medical device companies, contract manufacturers, and suppliers. We recently spoke with him about the four major trends he sees based on those discussions. Following is an edited version of that interview.
What is the dominant operational trend you’re seeing among medical device companies?
Bieszczat: Growing numbers of medical device manufacturers will rely more on automation to increase their capacity utilization. The pandemic-era spike in demand for medical products led many manufacturers to build out their production capacity. Demand has since slackened, leaving more machines to run fewer cycles and run jobs less frequently. This has led manufacturers to hold labor headcount flat and ask existing workers to do a wider variety of tasks.
In 2025, we can expect that demand—and therefore capacity utilization rates—will once again increase with the rise in onshoring and economic stabilization. However, medical device manufacturers are likely to continue holding labor headcount relatively flat and instead rely more on robotic- and vision system-based automation technologies, which have taken significant steps forward in ease of use and affordability.
This will push the concept of the connected worker even further into the front-line strategies of medical device manufacturers. Here, the objective will be enabling fewer people to perform multiple tasks by providing semi-autonomous automation aides in work center job instructions, in-line quality inspections, and automated systems for workflow tracking and exception reporting. Fewer people will man multiple work centers, aided by modern technologies that are enabled by abundant machine intelligence and computational horsepower.
Do you anticipate any changes in how medical device manufacturers manage their supply chains?
Bieszczat: Definitely. More medical device manufacturers are extending inventory management across their supply chains. Understanding the status of inventory across the supply chain presents particular challenges for this industry. Today, many manufacturers still lack clear visibility of the products in their treatment delivery chain, which extends to doctors, hospitals and clinics.
In 2025, we’re likely to see a push for greater visibility up and down the medical device supply chain in order to ensure product availability while controlling costs. We’re already seeing more small and mid-market medical device manufacturers gain this visibility as they adopt enterprise and supply chain management technologies.
Generative AI and artificial intelligence in general continue to remain top of mind. What is the biggest impact you’re seeing from these technologies?
Bieszczat: Interestingly, the hype around artificial intelligence and gen AI has created a greater awareness of what can be done with data and traditional analytics using more conventional tools. A case in point: during one football game, the announcers said Google Analytics had proven that a particular quarterback completes 67% of his passes. But that calculation could have been accomplished using Microsoft Excel.
Of course, the analytics required for managing production, inventory, finance, and other manufacturing operations are inherently more complex. So, we are seeing much greater interest among medical device manufacturers in using the data and analytics they already own—for example, in their enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution system (MES) software—to make data-driven decisions. That trend will only accelerate in 2025.
Is the relationship that medical device manufacturers have with technology changing in other ways?
Bieszczat: There’s a growing generational shift in how manufacturing executives in the medical device sector use data and interact with the ERP systems that collect and deliver this information. The industry has largely switched to dashboards and similar data visualization techniques. Not only do dashboards make information more actionable; they also make data and insights more broadly available to management and front-line workers alike.
But we’re also seeing a new generation of manufacturing executives who have grown up in a digital world. They are going beyond an ERP system’s standard reports and making the low code/no code ERP dashboard tools their preferred method of information delivery. In 2025, we will see more of these digital natives going directly to the ERP system’s database to mine, compile, and present exactly the information they want to drive their decision-making.
The shift is one more way that medical device manufacturers are evolving into data-driven businesses to maximize their productivity, efficiency and productivity while planning for future growth.
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