Case Study: Medical Device Refurbishment Program

In the spring of 2008, a formidable medical device manufacturer discovered that a large supply of their laser flow cytometers had multiple failures that could not be specifically identified by the company’s internal design team. With thousands of unusable units sitting on the shelf, the manufacturer was faced with the tough decision of scrapping the units and starting over, or determining whether they could be appropriately refurbished at a favorable cost.

The devices were brought to II-VI Optical Systems for analysis. This provided a unique opportunity for design engineers to “reverse engineer” the device to identify existing failures, and to also make recommendations for a re-design that would virtually eliminate any future end use performance failures. Equally challenging would be whether the re-designed device could be produced to meet the manufacturer’s stringent production throughput, acceptance and budget parameters.