Most converters, no matter what they manufacture, probably think they know their customers pretty well. After all, how can you get them to buy your product? Oliver Medical, on the other hand, has gone far beyond its competitors in this race. Its new Oliver OnSite™ program of advanced technical services for medical-package engineering is a standout, winning the company the 2007 Innovator Award for Customer Focus.

The Grand Rapids, MI-based converter specializes in sterile-grade, flexible, adhesive-coated rollstock, die-cut lidding, and various types of pouches for medical-device packaging applications. Two plants in Michigan and one in Venray, The Netherlands, serve customers worldwide.

Technical services, particularly in the field served by Oliver Medical, are a given. Helping customers choose the right materials to match product, sterilization and packaging-machinery requirements is par for the course.

“Historically, we have supported customers like other converters—selling their products into a potential end user,” recalls Randall Troutman, technical director for Oliver Medical. “Over the years, Oliver Medical recognized that we needed to have a better understanding of what the customer needs from us. We need to be able to look at their requirements from a systemic point of view, understanding their costs, processes, quality expectations, and barriers to change.”

The converter did just that. Troutman has seven years of experience with medical-device makers Smith & Nephew Orthopaedics and Medtronic. Engineering program manager Kevin Zacharias worked for Baxter Healthcare for over a decade, and QC/regulatory affairs manager Lora Keena has 10-plus years in a medical-device business since purchased by Tyco.

“We're really the only one in the industry who is able to match up with our customers' needs on a level that provides them with added value,” explains Jeff Murak, Oliver director of marketing and sales. “Before, we had engineering support, but now we have experienced technical staff from the medical field with invaluable experiences.”

The newly tradenamed Oliver OnSite™ (www.oliveronsite.com) program has been well received. Five projects ranging from material conver sions to new product introductions are currently underway.

Solution-based opportunities rather than “materials selling” remains one of the program's chief concepts, Troutman adds, “in the medical-device industry, it's a long sales cycle. It's a complicated market to penetrate because our customers, driven by patient and product safety as well as government regulations, tend to be risk-averse to change.”

To assist in this area, the program extends beyond helping with mere “material technical” issues to include protocol development, package and process validation, report authoring and even managing projects at multiple customer plants, especially for larger corporations. New materials are evaluated and test-run on Oliver's in-house laboratory equipment. “We'll present all the data to a customer so the preliminary package-engineering screening work is done,” Murak says.

Thinking and acting like its customers also provides Oliver Medical with a way to avoid an all-too-common pitfall for converters. As the medical-packaging market in general becomes more cost-driven, offering value-added services from vendor-managed inventory programs to downstream process- and material-improvement projects is seen as a major plus versus competitors. “We have opportunities to help users not only with materials savings but with all of the other services we can provide. By providing enhanced value to our customers, we can avoid price-warring situations which, in turn, commoditizes the products,” Troutman says.

Along with extensive involvement with various industry groups such as ASTM, IoPP and the FPA's Sterile Packaging Manufacturers Council, Oliver Medical staffers regularly offer white papers and seminar presentations at conferences and trade shows. A fully loaded Website lets industry professionals e-mail questions, which are then pooled together and answered by the Oliver Answer Team, which is made up of team members from the various support functions within the company. Detailed application/engineering forms on the site also speed up Oliver's response to customer requests.

“This does two things. It allows us to accurately specify the best-fit materials, as well as consider what other issues the customer may face,” Troutman explains. “If a customer is working with two types of rollstock material, we can proactively address a majority of the current issues that they will encounter related to the entire packaging lifecycle. It's these types of things we do that are above and beyond,” he says. “That's Oliver OnSite™.”