Background

Becton Dickinson is the market leader within their field of medical technology, and have over 28 000 employees in 50 countries.

BD’s product assortment consists of disposable products for infusion treatment. The products are mainly used by doctors and nurses in surgery and intensive care worldwide. BD handles the entire chain, from development to production and packing of products. 

Problem

One of the first treatments at an accident with an injured person is to insert an intravenous catheter. On one hand it helps to save lives, but on the other it can also implicate danger for spreading different viruses.

Solution

Becton Dickinson and Avalon have worked together in a collaboration project, to solve the problem of the risk that viruses are carried over to another person from using the intravenous catheter.

Becton Dickinson has also started up a large automation project for tip shaped catheters. It went from rebuilding the old technology to become a new design of the machine to be used in the product line. Becton Dickinson also needed a fully automated production line for mounting tip shaped catheters. The functions of the production line should also handle shaping of the catheter.

Avalon has taken part in the initial project phase and also in the project group during creation of the requirement specification. The tasks that Avalon performed also included creating a new methodology to handle extensive construction assemblies. Another important task was listing of functional product requirements. Frequent inquiries were used to examine how the users perceived different functional requirements before making the final decision about the VenflonTM Pro Safety product.

Result

Successfactors of the project,

• Becton Dickinson is able to produce more infusion cannulae in their production line with the new machine.
• The quality of the produced products have increased.
• The end-users has gained from the increased quality and hence they are more satisfied.
• The VenflonTM Pro Safety product has been recognized all around the worldreceived a very positive response internationally. It generated  the Red Dot Design Award – Best of the Best in 2008.
• Considerable increase of volume.