September 21, 2004
Loyalty and Trust... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes."
Like many of the dozens of medical manufacturing plants throughout Puerto Rico, this one was modest and straightforward. Surrounded by the usual robust fence with a typical guard station, the entry process was conducted in Spanish with Visitor badges handed out all around.
The front lobby displayed a glass case with some half-dozen medical devices, all designed to provide pain relief and healing assistance to knees and ankles, and our increasingly vulnerable aching backs. You've seen these devices if you know anyone with a knee implant or a serious sports injury, and are aware of others in the aftermath of back surgery.
Still, the whole of the plant only required a small clean room to handle the sensitive assembly of parts, a single robotics system to lightning-quick place electronics on palm-sized mother boards, and basic manufacturing stations, from testing to quality control.
What could we visitors, so sophisticated in NASA-grade technology and used to huge economies of scale, possibly learn here?
--
There were standard performance measures, some of which proved intriguing: In 23 years of operation, the plant had an unblemished record of shipping orders the very day they were received. And from tiny Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, they actually held the lion's share of the US market.
But this is commonplace for Puerto Rico. There are 67 FDA-approved medical device manufacturers and 89 pharmaceutical companies. On this island, only 100 miles long and 35 miles wide, with just 4 million people, most of America's blockbuster drugs and a big chunk of its medical technology — from scalpels to bandages to braces — are churned out everyday. And they all read "Made in the USA." Because they are — Puerto Rico is part of the United States.
So, what could turn a pleasant visit to a medical device plant with lizards lazing on the palm trees out front into an eye-opening experience?
It started with the general manager saying something that major business schools tell global, multi-national Fortune 500 companies all the time. He said, "We take 100 hours each year for training for each employee." Looking around at the people assembling parts through microscopes and I had to ask: "What do you train them in?" And he said, "Values."
--
He went on to say that "we need to work as a team, and without trust there can be no team, so we talk about trust. You have to earn the loyalty of people, and then they trust you. We live in a networked society, and the society is only as strong as the network."
Amazingly, this went beyond the employees themselves. The company, Electro Biology, Inc., has the sons and daughters of its 150 employees come to work at the plant each summer vacation. EBI underwrites the education of these children, and also sends the employees and their offspring to attend seminars together. Today, some of the children are even more educated than their parents. So, yes, the society is only as strong as the network.
There are other things I can tell you. Like the signs on the walls in Spanish which translate to "The quality grows if you participate in the suggestion plan." Or how they keep the robotics equipment at the local engineering school up-to-date, so it enables a ready back-up should their own equipment fail, while supporting education and training at the University.
So let me say just this: Bartolome Gamundi, the General Manager of Electro Biology, is on to something.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
Back to Five Minutes List
