Jon Montcrief shares his career path in chemical engineering and process development roles in the medical device industry. He discusses challenges in manufacturing, supply chains, and the regulated medical device industry.
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About the guest: Jon Montcrief, holds a bachelor's and master's degree in chemical engineering and is currently the director of process development and sustaining engineering at Becton Dickinson, where he applies his process engineering and polymer background to develop products in the medical device space. John, thank you so much for joining us today.
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About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
Jon Montcrief shares his career path in chemical engineering and process development roles in the medical device industry. He discusses challenges in manufacturing, supply chains, and the regulated medical device industry.
Main Topics:
About the guest: Jon Montcrief, holds a bachelor's and master's degree in chemical engineering and is currently the director of process development and sustaining engineering at Becton Dickinson, where he applies his process engineering and polymer background to develop products in the medical device space. John, thank you so much for joining us today.
Links:
About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
Hi everyone, we've set up this being an engineer podcast as an industry knowledge repository, if you will, we hope it'll be a tool where engineers can learn about and connect with other companies, technologies, people, resources and opportunities. So make some connections and enjoy the show.
Jon Montcrief:You can promote somebody when you can recognize them publicly. You know, to me finding out what motivates people other people don't want a title or money. They want you to say to their wife or their kid that daddy or mommy is doing a great job at work. And I've done that and to see the joy that it brings the people on the personal touch. Those are the best days to me.
Aaron Moncur:Hello, and welcome to the V and engineer Podcast. Today. We are delighted to be speaking with Jon Montcrief, who holds a bachelor's and master's degree in chemical engineering and is currently the director of process development and sustaining engineering at Becton Dickinson, where he applies his process engineering and polymer background to develop products in the medical device space. Jon, thank you so much for joining us today.
Jon Montcrief:Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here.
Aaron Moncur:All right, well dive into it. How did you decide to become an engineer,
Jon Montcrief:it actually goes all the way back to 10th grade, I loved chemistry. And my teacher was kind enough and had the foresight to say, Don't become a chemist, there's not great pay on that. And you probably would rather be an engineer in what that advice, she put me on the path to understanding what a chemical engineering degree could do. And it was really there that I found, you know, my passion that I always liked the chemistry side of things. But the engineer being able to build it and apply it really helped. And then I actually, job shadowed, was probably like my junior year in high school for a father of someone I knew in high school. And it was at a tape manufacturing company where I got to go in the factory floor and see I was made and tested. And that was really it from, you know, 10th 11th grade on I haven't looked back. That's
Aaron Moncur:very cool. What a great experience for such a young age even and to have someone looking out for you like that to make suggestions. It's interesting, I actually have not interviewed that many chemical engineers, maybe, I don't know, five or 10 Turn over the last 230 episodes of the podcast. And recently, maybe three or four months ago I spoke with I can't even remember if he himself was a chemical engineer now. But he mentioned that whenever he hires an engineer for for process development roles, he really likes to hire chemical engineers. And I had never heard that or considered the chemical engineering might inherently have this bias towards or innate skill set for process development. But But since then, you know, it's like when it rains, it pours I guess, right? The Universe focuses its energy somehow, I have spoken with three or four chemical engineers, who are all in process development roles. Have you found that just to be kind of a natural fit for your your chemical engineering background?
Jon Montcrief:Yeah, I think it does work. Well, on the process side, I think a lot of the times may be the sort of the the first you know, like, if you're a mechanical engineer, right, you're used to putting, you know, widgets together, right? So you're more mechanically sound, you want to look at drawings, or AutoCAD, where the chemistry side, right, you're kind of looking at the bigger picture, you want to see how things come together, right, you know, A to B to see sort of the steps or the logical flow of things. Because that's how a lot of chemistry based processes go in. So it does naturally, you know, kind of go into those things. So you do find a lot of chemical engineers and process development. I will say one thing is, if you continue this podcast, there may be less of us, because I'm old enough to say that, you know, 25 years ago, there were no biomedical engineering. He's in now there are. So when I tend to hire people, if they're the younger generation, they have very specific degrees in biomedical engineering that naturally go into the medical device world or pharmaceutical worlds. But they are learning a lot about chemistry, you know, in those engineering type degrees.
Aaron Moncur:Interesting. Okay, I'll have to keep an eye on that. So you are a leader in the medical device space. You're a director, which is, you know, it's it's a prestigious position. It's one of respect and accomplishment. And I imagine there are people listening to this who think, you know, one day, I would love to be able to contribute at that level. Can you share a few things? What do you think are some of the largest factors that have allowed you to achieve this role?
Jon Montcrief:Certainly. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of it probably does go back to the starting where I had I went to Northeastern University in Boston mass, and they had a very strong Co Op program. And through that Co Op program, you know, I had about four different roles and I Think what you learned in those club experiences, what you love about a job, and maybe what you don't love about a job, right, but you're not locked in the company is not locked into you. And I was fortunate that, you know, I had a job in engineering textiles, and it was really the background that I needed to learn about, you know, how those could be scaffolds to grow human tissues, or to fix things in the human body. You know, so I think that sort of textile background and understanding really, you know, got me started. And then, you know, the medical device side, I do agree that it's prestigious, you get a lot of recognition, I worked for some other jobs in in, in, in industrial roles. And while the, the job itself is really hard, and the chemistry or the engineering might be hard, when you tell somebody that you work on a potato chip bag, they don't resonate, the same as when you say, you know, I helped develop the implant that went in to your to your mom, or your grandpa. And I think that that ability, and that sort of, you know, there is a desire to work in that industry. Right. And I do think about that it's something we say every day, you know, is we would not do anything or launch anything if we weren't comfortable putting it into someone in our family. And, you know, there's a lot of honor and procedure that goes into that.
Aaron Moncur:Absolutely, yeah, I recently visited with a customer out in California. And they make a surgical robot, which was just one of the coolest engineering feats that I've seen. And they let me drive it. In fact, word from my team that I tend to break things hadn't reached them yet. So I got the opportunity to drive this thing. And it was so so just inspiring, really, you know, and to hear about the stories that this this machine this robot has, has led to possibilities and opportunities within the medical space for patients, things that just weren't possible before that they can be done now, really, really inspiring. And, you know, just we're all part of the human species. I think hearing things like that. There's just this natural tendency to feel a sense of awe and gratitude towards those kinds of accomplishments.
Jon Montcrief:I've seen some of those robots. They're amazing engineering technology, the advancements they allow. And I'll say that, you know, one tidbit from the medical engineering side is, we actually go out on purpose to to people like me, like yourself or other surgeons, and we want you to break the device, because we learn about shamanic factors. And one of the things that I've learned is what we may think is intuitive as an engineer, because we look and see things a certain way, a surgeon, right is not going to look at it that way, they don't have the same engineering background. So this whole study where it's literally called Human Factors, where we'll bring it out, not tell a surgeon how to use it, and hope that they either do break it or teach us, okay, this is something they may do. And then we'll build in an engineering control to prevent that from happening in the future. So you might have a future in breaking medical devices or robots.
Aaron Moncur:Oh, man, I would succeed so well, at that I would just be the the top of the line right there. That's my dream, job break things. Break cool engineering technology. All right. Well, let's talk a little bit about manufacturing. What what kinds of trends are you seeing in manufacturing these days could be something about, you know, costs of manufacturing, or new processes, old processes that aren't being used anymore different materials. But what patterns in general have you noticed emerging recently, so
Jon Montcrief:a few things there, I would say there's a big push for, you know, digital factory, or smart factory where we're taking advantage of, you know, software and other, you know, things that exist in other industries, where we can do data collection in real time, right? Understand trends that are happening on those machines, there's a lot of documentation that goes into when you make a medical device, that needs to be a lot of lot traceability, I know that exists and other, you know, factories, but there's a big push on it. But it makes a lot of paper, you can have a lot of human mistakes, right? If you write in the wrong entry, and then you have to cross it out. So there's a push for what they call like electronic records or EDA chart. So between the, you know, having the machines have data collection, and then also the documentation or travelers or routers or whatever term you use, there's a big push to do that, you know, on the manufacturing floor, have operators be working, you know, right on tablets, and I mean, it's, it's kind of interesting, right? Because in our house, in our, in our life, we're all on smartphones, there's a lot of paper that's on a manufacturing floor, right? So there's a big push to to go away from the paper and go more electronic comes with safety concerns right around cybersecurity and where that information could go, but there's a big push there. On the material side, supply chain challenges exist, you know, I think they affect everybody. Inflation costs are up. So you know, companies that provide raw materials are looking to cut their costs and then you know, if we get change notification saying or raw material on the medical device side, it's a lot of work to go would improve that we're gonna make the equivalent product with the new material. And it could take years where we're doing the testing. And the testing that we do to validate that the material is the same and performs the same, we also have to do safety testing, right? Is it biocompatible, and then those have to get approved by regulatory bodies. So, you know, projects take years. And the more changes we have, right, it's just more work to increase to, to keep our products in the market, it has been a big challenge, you know, over the last few years, maybe compared to prior to that. The just the sustaining engineering? Absolutely. So standing is, is taking up a large part and it's in, it's driven by, you know, supply chain issues or streamlining by other companies, right, that are looking to maybe cut costs, so they're not going to make 10 different grades of material, they're going to make two, but it's the now we need to prove that that grade is equivalent for what we need in our device, maybe versus other industries.
Aaron Moncur:Of course, during COVID supply chain was severely impacted. Have you seen supply chain kind of return to the baseline it was before? Or is it still a little up and down?
Jon Montcrief:That still little up and down? I think the signals are a bit more clear in the sense that, you know, companies and COVID couldn't make something because they didn't have the raw material. Now, it seems to be more strategic in this is our plan, right? Or we've seen, you know, baby factories, or rather than four different factories that make something similar, they're going to make it unwanted, they're going to try to do an economy of scale. But the companies are more proactively making decisions to kind of streamline their portfolio. And so they can focus on things, but then it does have a trickle down effect. You know, to us, we have talked about and probably most companies, should we be doing more dual sourcing to protect us against those things. But there's a cost to that. Right, not only from a human resource aspect, but from a, you know, material and project aspect.
Aaron Moncur:Right. Yeah, that makes sense. Let's move from manufacturing to talking about engineers for a bit. What are some of the traits or behaviors or habits that you see in the most successful engineers? And then if it's a different answer, also in the most successful engineering teams?
Jon Montcrief:Okay, sure. So I'm going to steal an analogy that, you know, my CEO gave to some of us leaders. And he was his question was, what water sport do you like to play, and what he was getting at is you should want to play water polo, and not being an individual lap swimmer. And I thought that picture and message really resonated to me. Because you could be a fabulous engineer and really know your stuff and be very technical. But that kind of keeps you in your lane. If you're not willing or able to talk to someone in quality engineering, or regulatory or design, then you're not going to probably really be to me, a well broadened engineer, and probably not really be successful on a team. So you know, I think you got to have the technical goods, right? Because that's really, you know, the backbone. But if you don't kind of want to, or enjoy playing with other members of the team, I don't think you're going to ultimately get to hopefully the success that you would want to get to.
Aaron Moncur:I agree, 100%, I probably see this way too often, and people are sick of it. But you can be the most technically skilled engineer in the room, you know, 99th percentile, maybe 100th percentile. But if you're if your soft skills, your communication skills aren't that great, there is a limit to how far you can climb. But if your technical skills are good enough, you know, maybe they're 80th percentile or something. But your communication, your soft skills are really, really exceptionally good. There's almost no limit to how far you can go in your career. I found that to be true. And just over and over and over again, with people I've come into contact with. Yeah,
Jon Montcrief:absolutely. It may also come down to I'm not saying every engineer needs to be a leader or manager, right? You don't want to if that's not your skill, set and desire, but you're probably not going to succeed in a large company like Becton Dickinson, like with a lot of people, you know, maybe a small startups or a very, you know, focused role, right, where, you know, you could just be in that technical side, and that's, but it's got to be an understanding right between the other people in the company and you. But I think that's when I see engineers ultimately succeed, you know, certainly, in the later parts of their career or really, like you say, grow, it takes those soft skills and the willingness to not only a willingness, it's, I think you got to be willing to do it, but you probably really need to enjoy it. Because if you're just faking it, I don't think that's going to ultimately, you know, get there either, right? There's going to be a limitation.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, yeah. I like what you said about maybe you don't want to become a leader, you know, a manager or a PPO director, whatever it is, and that's a great insight. I have, I think it's really important, just to be very aware of what it is that makes you happy. I've worked with engineers of the past who were extremely technically gifted far more so than I am and did not work so well with other people. And eventually, you know, things didn't work out here, right. And they kind of go off and some of them have gone off to work by themselves, right, be effectively freelance who's out there? And they do great. You know, they just they get to do the technical work, and they don't, they don't have to interface with a lot of other people. And that could be a great solution, if that's what you're into? Absolutely. All right. Well, what, speaking of technical skills, what are the most valuable? Because we do have to have this baseline of technical acumen? What are the most valuable technical skills that you want to see in your engineers? And especially in the newer engineers? I'm curious to hear? Are you seeing enough of these skills?
Jon Montcrief:I think, you know, skills that are certainly important to succeed are some level of material science or an understanding how materials come together, you know, that that's always really big, at least in our industry, right? Certainly, where material interactions are going to be important, right? What are the properties that you need in the material? Are they going to be able to bond or glue or go with something else? Are they going to be able to be sterilized? So a level of understanding on the material science side I think, is important, at least in the branch that I work in? I do think, you know, engineers come in with that, right? They are exposed to it. And then I think, you know, the the willingness to apply themselves to learn, particularly in their job, what those materials might be, because if you get a broad sense of the job, right, there was only going to be so much you get in school to compare it to, like on the job training. And then, you know, with that, it's probably the willingness to want to learn, right? I think when you're coming in as an engineer, or probably in any job, right, you got to have a hunger or desire to learn more and learn quickly, and want to talk to people that have been around. And you can see that right. And I think the engineers that ended up doing well, there's a there's a passion that you can feel, you know, when you walk into a room, in that they want to learn and get better, you know, versus maybe the person that's been there for 20 years? And the answer is no, it won't work, because I tried this right. So definitely right, you from early on. So right, I think you can see it. But that might be part of someone's DNA, right? Again, I don't know if that's a taught trait, right? In school, right? The desire or the hunger to learn, and then apply it, you know, where you have. The other skill that I think at least in medical device, that that tends to be maybe not taught in school, but being able for most of them to quickly pick up on is like, just statistical analysis, really being able to, like, understand and do things in Minitab is definitely important, you know, from a data perspective, you know, true in any industry, but certainly in medical device, the ability to look at data from early engineering study screening studies, how that might apply to validations with larger sample sizes, what it means for, you know, scrap rate or follow defect, those are important, certainly, on the process development side, you know, we we say that, if you're making like, a one or a two, you know, quantity prototype that's really early on r&d, once you want to scale it into a manufacturing, you have to really understand, are we going to be able to replicate it? Or are we going to be able to do it consistently into what, you know, criteria so that on the process side certainly kind of sets us apart in the in the people that gravitate to that you can look at right away and be like, yeah, they're on the rights five process. If they don't want to do that, and there's no desire, then, again, you got to talk about career change, maybe they should be in the, you know, true r&d, you know, first of the kind type stuff. Awesome.
Aaron Moncur:And speaking of processes, that is a perfect segue into a short plug for my company, pipeline design and engineering, where we develop new and innovative manufacturing processes for complex products, then implement them into manual fixtures or fully automated machines to dramatically reduce production costs and improve production yields for OEMs. Today, we're speaking with Jon Montcrief. Jon, what what are a few of your biggest challenges as an engineering leader?
Jon Montcrief:Sure, I mean, I would say from the company perspective, we talked about it earlier, the supply chain challenges in a regulatory worlds are definitely a big challenge, trying to do things and timelines that we can get, you know, projects through our challenge before we run out of material in a highly regulated industry. In terms of more on like, the manager or team building side, I think it's, you know, getting in young talent, keeping them happy in their career progression, right, while balancing sort of the business needs. I know there can be a lot of frustration sometimes with, well, why haven't I got promoted? Or why am I not on this, you know, project, I'm ready for it. And so it's a balance to what I said earlier, right? Like, I really want that hunger and passion to learn, but it can't be out of the delusional rate where they can do things exponentially. You know, I had an I had an entry level engineer. At one time, asked me if I could summarize 15 years of engineering experience into like an eight hour course that he could do online and I could certify, and it turns out, he was actually serious. So, you know, I think there's a challenge there.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, that's wonderful. Speaking of that, I'll just mention this really quickly. We I've been getting into chat GPT lately, and just experimenting with it. And these new GPT agents that open AI has released. And one of the things that we're doing right now is we're creating a being an engineer, podcast GPT agent, where what we've done is upload all of the transcripts of all of the podcast episodes, right? So 220 230, something like that. And now we can query this agent and say, Yeah, who was the guest for season one, episode 33, which, you know, that by itself is not that interesting. But then you can get a lot more detail and say, give me a summary of that episode. And then he can say things like, okay, take into account all the engineering leaders that we've spoken with. And let's say that I want to approach one of these leaders and and, and convince him or her to be a mentor for me, what are some ways that I could present myself that would be most compelling to these leaders, it's almost like having the combined knowledge of these 200 Plus guests at your fingertips, and you can just query and ask them questions. And of course, the answers are limited to the content that they've shared. But still, that's a lot of high level engineers who have shared content that you could just quickly query, you know, probably there's in our recourse here that we can certify someone for being a
Jon Montcrief:leader. No, I mean, you know, joking aside, that is technology, right, that didn't exist before and does have the ability to process a ton of information. So I mean, there, there probably are some ways to be able to do that, you know, certainly, more quickly and efficiently, right? And get information probably better at remembering, you know, did you could ever do the same way with every email or report I've written right? I can't remember all that off the top of my head, but the agent might be able to so yeah, there are probably ways to streamline it for sure.
Aaron Moncur:It's really pretty mind blowing some of the things that are becoming possible now with with AI. Yeah. Okay. Back to back to Jon, let's talk about Jon, what, what are some of the biggest challenges that that you Jon see facing medical device companies these days?
Jon Montcrief:I think it's a, you know, probably a broken record here a little bit, but it's to keep products on the market with some of the challenges that you know, are coming from maybe the raw material side of the business. And then how you do that, in a regulated industry, where the time to get approvals is quite long. So specifically, you know, P FOSS right now, right is a major concern, right, we want to be able to eliminate it from materials that we use, if it does exist, and the material that we've used for a long time, we got to find the replacement for it, we got to prove that it's safe and effective. And then you have to get approved. In Europe right now, with the new, you know, relatively new regulations, eu MDR, it's taking us two to three years to get changes approved. So you're talking about, excuse me, you know, potentially five years from Notice of Change, to prove in a clear, you know, clear and unapproved and be able to use the market. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:wow, that's a long time. Totally understand, we actually have a customer who is working on that problem right now getting rid of the P FOSS. So hopefully, some new solutions will be coming to the market in the near future. Okay, what, what is a tool that doesn't exist right now, but if it did exist, would help your team perform dramatically better than it does today? You we're not talking about 20%? Better, we're talking about 5x 10x better? And feel free to to let your answer be outside the realm of known physics even but what what do you think that could exist or not necessarily could exist? But what if it did exist, that could really dramatically improve performance?
Jon Montcrief:I mean, it could be along the lines of AI, like you're talking about, I mean, I do feel like despite our best efforts, we can repeat mistakes. Or maybe it's not even, it may be repeat mistakes as a company where an engineer 10 years ago, knew of an issue, and he documented it. So I lose my voice. But the new engineer on the project doesn't have that knowledge or doesn't know that that report exists. So now they go off on a pathway. And they might spend time, right analyzing or understanding or testing and the solution might have already been there. So you know, could it be that you have AI or, or an ability to be able to cipher through all that material that's happened, which, as I mentioned earlier, some of it may be on paper, right. So it might even be the process of taking anything that's on paper, getting it into a library that they could start For be able to do it, you know, so that it's not, you know, not not taking the time to potentially repeat the same mistake or get to the same conclusion, if we could shrink that time, as I mentioned, right projects takes so long Anyways, if we could get that time back, that'd be important. And then it's definitely less, you know, far out in the future. But if there was an ability to snap our fingers and get everything from paper to electronic quickly, that would be huge, right? Because again, building in the robust systems to make sure, when we transition from paper to, you know, the the electronic, we have to make sure that it's done correctly. So if there's a way to speed up that process as well, I do think there's going to be a lot of benefits to getting the human operator writing stuff down, you know, mistakes that happen. And because when they do happen, you know, no one's doing it on purpose, but then you have to have other people go in and look at the mistake and say, Okay, is it right? Is the product still good? Was this actually just someone writing it down wrong? Or did they build it wrong, right, and so we have to go through that analysis. So you know, for what may seem like a simple typo or, or scribble, there's a lot of, you know, hours that go into making sure that what we're making is okay,
Aaron Moncur:I think AI is definitely going to help in that area. In fact, just this morning, or yesterday, I can't remember now, I have this PDF document had a table in it. And I needed to get that table into Excel. And I tried just copying all the data from the PDF and pasting it into Excel. Of course, anyone who's tried that before probably knows what happens next, like you just get, even though there are five columns in the table, everything goes into one column, and even messing around with the you know, delamination, things like that. It doesn't the data doesn't, doesn't transfer quickly. So I thought I could spend 20 minutes like individually copying cells from PDF to Excel, but I really don't want to do that. So I thought, let's see if GPT can can help with this. And I just took a screenshot of that table in PDF format, put it into GPT. I said, Hey, give me a table that I can paste into Excel. And it should have five columns, and the column headers are ABCDE. And boom, spit out this this code, I copied it, pasted it into Excel. And it was perfect. I was shocked that it worked, frankly, but it was amazing, you know, saved a little bit of time there. Yeah, yeah,
Jon Montcrief:no, well, like you said time. And then also, if it gets done correctly, right, it can save the timeline, if you did have a mistake, and then you use that document over and over again, right type of thing?
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that one of the biggest problems in engineering is exactly what you hit on that we are constantly reinventing the wheel. I mean, how many times have we designed a snap hook that's going to be plastic injection molded, right, or some kind of crushed rib or whatever the feature is? I don't know what the percentage is. But I would not be surprised at all to learn that it's 50% 70% of the time on majority of the time where you're designing something, someone somewhere at some company in some country has already designed that thing. Right? And if if we could somehow tap into that, that database, wow, well, imagine the acceleration to engineering that we could achieve with that.
Jon Montcrief:Totally, because then you can go work on the next thing that hasn't been. Exactly,
Aaron Moncur:yes. Yeah. Ai, hopefully. All right. Well, if you had no limitations on time, resources, money, etc, what is the one thing that you would do for your company that would have the most significant impact on achieving its business goals?
Jon Montcrief:I guess you know, what I would probably do based on some of the supply chain, I would probably vertically integrate everything. And at least, we know, hopefully, and ahead of time, that yeah, there might be a problem down the road. But rather than be dependent on suppliers that are that are going to inform us and that we have to do it, the more we could vertically integrate, which is not easy. And it's expensive and time consuming. But you took those away from me. So it would probably be do as much as we could in our own manufacturing plants, so that we could have more control over, you know, long term plan and strategy.
Aaron Moncur:That's a great answer. I just spoke with a vendor yesterday who is trying to sell us something. And we've bought this something from other vendors who do not have control over their supply chain. And it's we've had problems, which is why we're talking with someone else, and they do have control over their supply chain. And just that alone is so attractive, right? Having that that control and authority. Absolutely. How do you see the the future of medical devices in the US changing over the next, say, five years?
Jon Montcrief:I mean, one of the things you talked about right would be following the trends from say the the other side of it right, so the robot is already been changing how medical devices are made, you know, us and many other companies are trying to develop, you know, products specifically to be done with the robot, right that maybe we're done. History directly with open surgery or with surgeon's hands then there was minimally invasive with like laparoscopic. So it's the biggest trend that we've seen. So I think the robot is going to proliferate and continue to do the surgeries it does now and more. And I think with that, right, you know, innovation is going to come with, Okay, we have this great new tool, this robot, what else can we do? Right? And how can we work with it? So that will be a big one, I think 3d printing is going to come on board and start to do a lot more. And, you know, there's talk about, well, why can't I add a custom medical device? Right? Why am I bound by, you know, you make this size and shape, right? You mentioned rivets, right? You know, same thing, right? Like, why couldn't somebody get a custom hip? or custom knee? Right, I send the scan for my surgeon, and this is exactly what I need, right? It's kind of the Invisalign, right for your teeth. Right, that was probably unheard of 30 years ago, right? You everyone had to get braces, then you could take a scan and you get they're made for you. There will probably be a push to be able to do that. Certainly, with all metal potentially, maybe all medical devices, or certainly things that are you know, custom design, you know, for your for you and your body what you need. I've heard about things that might be a little bit farther off. Right, but like, why do they need to be done in a manufacturing plant and sterilize and ship? Why can't we build them in the hospital itself and definitely need a sterile room? You know, those are probably a little bit farther out. But, you know, if you follow, right, like, consumer industry, right, there's a lot more that can be done at your door, right? Amazon ships, everything you need the next day, right? Like, I've heard surgeons say, why don't I get Amazon like treatment? For my medical device? When I tell you? No, it's gonna take me three months to make it right. So how we get there, you know, is is probably a steeper, you know, climb, but I think there will be that sort of, you know, desire and push right to make it, you know, direct to consumers exactly what they need, you know, consumers being patients and
Aaron Moncur:surgeons. Yeah. And ultimately, it's for the benefit of these patients. I liked what you talked about the robots and those becoming more and more common. This one that I saw a few weeks ago is, I mean, I been aware of this company in the robot for a long time. But I didn't know a lot of the details around it. And some of the things they shared were that it has allowed doctors or doctors surgeons who maybe would have retired already to to keep practicing medicine, maybe they would have retired because you know, they're getting older, it's hard to stand over someone for five hours doing surgery. Or even maybe their hands are a little bit a little bit of tremors going on there, you know, but their mind is still sharp, they know exactly what they're doing. But because of those reasons, maybe they would have had to retire now with these robots. You can sit down and do robotic kind of virtual in a way surgery. And the robot will take care the tremors but the mind is sharp. So the mind knows exactly how to articulate the hand and what operations to do. So anyway, just really cool stuff that definitely is going to increase patient outcomes over the next five years and beyond, of course, absolutely. All right. Well, Jon, we're getting towards the end here, specifically, within the context of your role as an engineer, what is one thing that frustrates you? And one thing that brings you joy?
Jon Montcrief:So I think, frustrating, right? In I get it right? You know, if you work for a large company, and it's, you know, capitalistic, right, you know, companies are designed, right, we want to help patients, the way to make money is that there are times where there are cost cutting measures, you know, made or decisions made, right, you know, if you've been through a layoff or an acquisition, you know, those can be frustrating, because they make sense for the business, but there is a people aspect to it. So I think, you know, there's a recognition that I have as a, as a people leader and a manager is that, you know, it's incumbent on me as the leader of the team to be able to explain these to people, right? And how do you separate the human aspect, right from that, to what makes sense for the business, and trying to articulate that and, you know, help people understand, while knowing right, that it can be a difficult decision, right? Whether it's a change in role, or, you know, the worst is if you you know, have to lay somebody off, or if there's a factory that closes, so sort of being able to separate that right, and be able to, you know, be able to understand from the business side of it right, as a leader, what makes sense for the company while it could have a personal impact. And so the flip side of that would probably be as you know, as a leader and I really do love running a team, right? I'm an engineer at heart, but I do love to be a leader is when you can give good news to somebody right? And you can promote somebody when you can recognize them publicly. You know, give a big award. You know, to me finding out what motivates people other people don't want a title or money. They want you to say to their wife or their kid that But, you know, daddy or mommy is doing a great job at work. And I've done that and to see, the joy that it brings the people on the personal touch is something that, you know, I've really always, those are the best days to me when I can when I have a personal touch and really inspire somebody that has done a good job and deserves that sort of credit and recognition. Amazing.
Aaron Moncur:I love that. Everything that we do, ultimately is in and through people. And I read a book a little while ago called The Book of joy. And it was a four or five day discussion, kind of an unheard of scenario where the Dalai Lama and Bishop Desmond Tutu sat down together. Apparently, they're good friends, but they hardly ever get to see each other. Anyway, they sat down for four or five days, and there was a journalist who was there kind of recording the event and the book, the book of joy is the result of that discussion, and lots of great golden nuggets in there. But the big takeaway for me was that joy comes from people, right? And so like, the better that we can develop these relationships, and and what's the word I'm looking for, just celebrate and honor and acknowledge the people who are doing great things that that's that's where the joy comes from. So I love your comment there. All right. Well, I think that is going to be it for our conversation today. Thank you so much, Jon, for joining me on the podcast today. How can people get a hold of you? Sure.
Jon Montcrief:Easiest way is probably through LinkedIn like most so if you get the spelling crack there, hopefully that goes out. But you know, Jon Montcrief, and I'll be on LinkedIn for Becton Dickinson. That's probably the fastest way to get a hold of me and then we can take it from there. Awesome.
Aaron Moncur:All right, Jon, thank you so much again. Right, thanks. I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design, and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode. To learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing turnkey equipment, custom fixtures and automated machines and with product design, visit us at Team pipeline.us. Thanks for listening