Interview with president of medela corporation

For thisinterview, I was so fortunate to have President of Medal Corporation Dry. Quickens with me on Monday. Dry. Quickens as a guest speaker for course ASSESS operation management invited by Professor Burger. Medal Corporation is a company provides quality products like breastplate and breastfeeding accessories for the needs ofnursingmothers around the world. Medal is a Swiss privately held company; it based in Machinery, IL, has more than 600 of employees with about $400 million revenue last year.

They are business-to-business based company have about 6, 000 customers around 35 countries worldwide. He mentioned their product flow process, the first two steps kind like the Chapter 3 in the textbook. First, they will do Forecasting which also means estimate how many PANS retail customers will order so their supplier ” MINCE” can buy parts to build product for them. The reason for that is because Medal products only when they get an order, also known as ” make-to-order”, not ” make-to-stock”.

Second step is Demand Planning; elect all PANS’ forecast by all departments, retailers, hospitals and hundreds of MINCE Stock keeping units as well. Then is Supply Chain using lead times ERP software calculates parts to order and when, also the pre-step of purchasing. After that they Purchasing, taking Customer orders, making Production Planning, then having Warehouse ready and finally they start Production process and shipping them to customers around nationwide.

Then Medal realized getting breast milk from mom to baby is not enough for them from the marketing point of view. As its target market evolves, they should continue to stay relevant to their customer’s needs, which is mom. Mom nowadays is very different from any pried of time with different values, behaviors and media habits. The things likesocial mediaand smartness. These Moms are true digital native people. So, in order to truly connect their special needs, Medal come up the idea to build a social media system.

By using this way, they not only could give mothers’ access to the information andeducationabout the benefits o proper use their feeding system, but also as part of company’s social media strategy, it also essential for facilitating their brand relationship with mothers’ values and trusts. Medal’s development plan is focusing on helping mothers meet their breastfeedinggoals, and support their efforts, which is to breastfeed longer. Mothers can communicate their experiences to each other through this software. Also by providing this software 2417 all day ability support and available for all the mothers.

The benefit from the marketing point of view on the one hand could attracted more mothers using this, on the other hand could help them to build a biggest and activist mother social communities ever. Mothers actually get points according to how active they are on the site. By reaching certain points Medal will send they some coupon online. And for the company later could use this to lunch their new products with low cost of advertising all thanks for this brilliant system. Dry. Quickens mentioned ” its not about price for our products, its about the products experiences and what can do for all their customers. “