Eric Peterson and Biometra

Eric Peterson and Biometra

From the very beginning Erik Peterson showed himself as an educated specialist with a good sense of thoughtfulness, maturity and collaboration. He was also respected by his colleagues and according to the senior management was a trustworthy valuable employee, though he was lacking some expertise in this particular field of business – medical devices. Getting a post of General Manager of Biometra’s operations, Erik was mainly responsible for the launch of the new catheter, and the launching was already missing the due date and delayed for two months (initial due date February 1, postponed due date April 1). Peterson had to communicate and report directly to the Assistant VP Jeff Hardy, he in his turn had to report to the VP of Product Operations Chip Knight. The President of Medical Devices Group was Richard Jenkins. Erik also had 5 key managers under his direct reporting.

The problems Erik Peterson faced while working on the launch of the new Biometra product:

1. Missed deadlines and problem areas. Firstly before getting the post of the General Manager, the launch of the new catheter was already facing many issues which affected the due date of the launch in a negative way. The inability to meet the original sales and distribution deadline (February 1) was due to different internal and external obstacles. After submitting a new launch date (April 1) Peterson had a limited timeframe to solve the key issues of the launch and prepare for the meeting with the company’s president of Medical Devices Group. From the very beginning the work Peterson had to go through was hard, stressful and challenging. As a manager and as a leader Erik had to show most of his skills and personal traits to achieve the goals. The key problem areas were global manufacturing supply chain, sales and marketing and customer service.

2. KOL’s support. KOLs were the doctors – leading experts in the medical fields related to the Biometra’s products. The cooperation with KOLs was important because they provided feedback to the engineers, conducted clinical trials, served as early adopters and recommended the product to the peers. Out of 100s targeted doctors the goal was to convince 20% of them to purchase the catheter by launch and 40% of them within 3 month. However, Peterson faced certain hesitation from the early adopters during the launching process, because most of the KOLs were already aware of the different types of issues. 5 KOL’s were already delaying their trials until after launch.

3. Manufacturing facilities in Costa Rica. Since it was quite challenging to set up Biometra’s scaled up manufacturing operation for the commercial demand on small local facilities in Woburn (initially designed for product development and testing), the company decided to locate its manufacturing facilities in Costa Rica. The reasons of relocation are: lower operational costs, FDA-certified facilities and sufficient experience. Even though Costa-Rica had to manage production by themselves, and Peterson did not have to take care of it, he was still forced to go on site because the validation of Biometra’s production line has fallen seriously behind the schedule, specifications weren’t met and technicians were lost. The validation issues had to be resolved urgently to be ready for the KOL’s pre-launch. Another option of a validation issue which was taking so long was a Biometra’s placing orders in a too small proportion of the facility’s total capacity. Therefore manufacturers weren’t prioritizing Biometra’s needs. As the team was unable to solve the validation problem with Costa Rica, Peterson sent additional funds from marketing budget to hire a manufacturing consultant to work on site.

4. Miscommunication issues with the senior management. Apparently assistance VP of Product Operations Jeff Hardy was not helpful for Peterson .He provided no information on company’s restructuring and was unable to provide any necessary guidance. Also Hardy showed no support and pays attention to small problems disregarding major ones. He could not provide any clear directions and seemed to feel insecure about his own boss Jenkins. He as well took too much time to make decisions regarding the increase in funding for KOLs, having an unrealistic picture of how significant the problem was. No clear decision from Hardy made Peterson equivocate with the KOLs causing more of hesitation and damaging company’s reputation.

Jenkins also delayed decisions on making changes: particularly that concerned the equipment originally specified, contributing to further validation issues in Costa Rica.

Headquarters required changing supplier of the key composite material, which demanded additional time for the operations team to spend on negotiations and they were already overwhelmed.

5. Misunderstandings between project team members. From the beginning there were a lot of misunderstandings between sales representative (Wescott) and marketing specialist (Burns). Their relationship became straightened. There were also some initial issues regarding employees’ leaves and salary raise.

Two people from LA headquarters, Scott Green and Karen Cantor, joined the launch team to run the negotiations with KOLs. Due to the high importance of the project Peterson wanted to be reported directly from Los-Angeles colleagues, however they preferred to perform their responsibilities by themselves, which caused a certain amount of clashes during the work. After speaking with Cantor who is unable to handle critique, Peterson decided to stop interfering into the work of those two, because they were not likely to respond. Moreover they had a way richer professional expertise than Peterson and though Erik wanted to be completely involved in the issue with KOLs, he barely managed many other tasks of the launch.

Curt Andrews (director of operations) was overwhelmed taking care of difficulties of pre-launch operations as well as a validation issue in Costa Rica. Peterson suggested replacing or supplementing Andrews with a more competent person who had more pre-launch and start-up experience. When Peterson tried to work with Andrews he seemed resisting suggestions and suspecting lack of trust from Erik’s side. Also there was a tension between Andrews and Todd Jones (the manager of quality control) due to some disagreements. There were also some disagreements between Andrews and Miczek and a conflict between marketing and sales specialists on the topic of channels of advertising and its budget.

The underlying causes of the problems and how effective Peterson was in terms of managing a new operation and providing leadership.

Causes