PDMA-NZ Event hosted at Fisher and Paykel Healthcare - 31st July 2012

At our previous PDMA event at Gallagher’s, Craig White (Project Manager Fisher & Paykel Healthcare) and some of his colleagues shared their feedback about PDMA events with us:

They liked the factory tours and really liked the networking.
They’d love to see some real tools that companies use in the design process, so you learn something that you can implement / learn more about tomorrow.
They believed they could improve upon our last F&P Health Care event. (Even though it sold out!)
And they were working on this fantastic project that involves testing on the most precious of all ‘test groups’ – premature babies.
They shared stories about rapid prototyping and how they managed to rapidly test and amend prototypes during testing.

The combination sounded great, so we gave them a challenge: put your feedback in action and present your project!

They took up that challenge and hosted a fantastic event at Fisher & Paykel Healthcare’s amazing facilities in Highbrook, Auckland on July 31st 2012.

There was a fantastic turnout of over 75 people attending the event as well as over 30 people from Fisher & Paykel Healthcare helping with the tours and showing attendees some of the products and tools showcased.

Craig White and his team shared their story of the development of the Optiflow Junior product, which has just recently launched into the market.

Matthew Payton, Product Group Manager kicked off the night with a short introduction about F&P Healthcare to set the scene. With an operating revenue of of NZ$ 516m, exporting worldwide and doubling their sales every 4-5 years F&P Health Care is doing very well in it market niche and is on a continuous growth journey. They took us on a factory tour to show the production of the Optiflow products, which have just launched in the market.

Next, Craig White, Laurence Gulliver and Mike Ronayne (all of the Optiflow Junior Product Development team) shared some of the tools they used in the development of the Optiflow Junior product. Craig, Laurence and Mike are all familiar faces to us, as they’ve all been involved in the PDMA, in fact Craig has been involved since the start of PDMA in NZ.

They shared their learning journey:

Visiting 50 hospitals around the world to watch and learn how their current product is used.
Take those insights; understand the customer values and how to deconstruct those into project objectives.
How those objectives then helped to guide the design.
How they used set based design to shorten timeframes and improve quality of the overall design, how it helped them close knowledge gaps.
How they went through clinical trials and tested 13 different designs on over a hundred babies and rapidly tweaked the designs.

It was clear to all how F&P HC’s mission to “provide devices which can help to improve patient care and outcomes” was the inspiration behind the product and how it delivers on that mission.

It was fantastic to see the passion in the team, knowing that they are working on a product that is going to make a real difference for many families and nursing staff around the world.

Thanks again to F&P Health Care for another fantastic event and raising the bar!