Key Takeaways
- Inventory targets are usually set without testing whether they're actually achievable, leaving companies to discover the gap only after committing to a number.
- Sales and operations own different halves of the same tradeoff and rarely share a model to manage it, so revenue targets and inventory targets pull against each other unmanaged.
- A single inventory target doesn't work across a device portfolio, since specialty segments like ortho, trauma, and cardiology run on fundamentally different operating economics.
- Movemedical's FOVA benchmarks a company against comparable operating models in its own segment, identifying over $100 million in annual value in one full engagement.
Everybody sets the target. Almost nobody checks whether it's achievable.
Retail figured this out decades ago. Grocery runs on a straightforward equation of sell through rate, expiration, and shelf placement, with standardized codes and barcodes doing most of the tracking work. Med device has none of that. It runs one of the most unique global supply chains of any industry, and that's exactly why the targets built against it are usually the wrong shape, not just the wrong size. Asset allocation drives both case readiness and revenue, yet the teams that own each side rarely share a model, a number, or even a conversation.
Here's what that looks like in practice. Reps carry ten sizes of an implant into a single procedure to bill for the one that actually gets used. Kits and trays go out configured for a specific surgeon or case, tracked nowhere in an ERP. Charge nurses and OR staff end up responsible for usage capture on top of patient care, so companies send people into the field just to find out what really happened during a case.
None of this is anyone's fault exactly. It's a system held together by years of patchwork fixes, each one reasonable on its own, all of them now too deep rooted to pull out cleanly.
Nobody can fix this alone
Somehow, working out of sync, device companies make it work just enough to skate by. Sales’ needs are typically top priority though - leadership is most willing to make accommodations against operational best practice, because they bring in the bread. So yeah, overstock the field, let 'em keep more in the trunk than they're allowed, because it's top line revenue growth not the bottom line that really moves things. Collaboration between sales and the ops folks is critical, but how can you really demand it if the models driving allocations don't have the data to maintain accurately?
Device companies often turn to their IT teams and ask them to build their own tools, their own layers on top of square ERP in the circular device hole. They're paying over top to consultants - up to seven figures to teams that have never stepped foot inside an OR - to tell them how to run a multimillion-dollar supply chain and commercial operations program. They're spending many more millions on data churning wheels like Palantir. Without the data.
So, when the world's leading field inventory platform offers something called a Field Operations Value Assessment (FOVA), the fair question is what exactly is the value here? If everyone is already spending time and resources to no avail, can Movemedical really bring something different to the table?
Short answer: yes, and we've proven it! Tens of millions in ROI delivered across multiple customers. In one case, a detailed twelve-point operational plan built over months of consultative engagement, the results of which you can trace through that manufacturer's subsequent earnings.
What we actually bring
Think of Movemedical like the crew in a heist movie. Ocean's Eleven, but for field operations.
Nearly twenty years of IT architecture and database experience. Add to it nearly two decades of arthroplasty leadership, starting in sales and moving through to running ops. Fifteen years of product development with multiple commercialized products and patents for top manufacturers. Fifteen years of data analytics. A decade of UX and user acceptance work at the fruit company. Another decade at an EHR. And another two decades building bill-only at one of the largest health systems in the US.
FOVA is all of that in one package. Delivered across a few days for the thirty-thousand-foot view, or over several months for the atomic one.
Here's what that crew does when it shows up.
First, we stress-test the target
Every planning cycle produces the same sentence. Do more with less. Then it produces a number, usually finance working backward. Maintain the revenue growth but take twenty percent out of field inventory. Cut freight fifteen. Improve turns.
Almost nobody asks the question that comes before the number. Is this achievable for a business like ours, in this segment, on this timeline?
There are two ways it goes wrong and neither acceptable. You hit revenue but miss the operational goals. Or you hit the ops targets but revenue stalls by starving the field of the inventory they needed to keep up with demand.
But each specialty segment has its own economics, and an overarching strategy does more damage than good. A primary knee runs around seven trays a case, the heaviest carrying cost in ortho. A hemi reimburses the same as a total knee on roughly two. Trauma is a responsiveness business, not a planning business. Interventional cardiology and peripheral vascular are planning businesses, measured on PAR and days on hand rather than turn rate. Wound care is bulk commodity, purchased and forecasted directly with no case linkage at all. I spent over a decade designing and commercializing devices across those segments, from wound care compression bandages to balloon catheters to 3D-printed knees, and one target across all of that is reductionist.
Looking for the money
Most of these problems carry an operations number and a revenue number, and the revenue number is bigger. Neither team can see it from where they sit, because it lives in between the ops dashboard and the sales forecast.
You can't turn a tray that isn't complete. If a third of your fleet isn't surgery-ready, your turn rate is fiction, and worse, it's hiding demand you couldn't serve. We help define what surgery-ready means before you measure anything else, because everything else gets measured against it.
What good actually looks like
An industry average isn’t always as insightful as we’d hope. What will matter more here is where do you sit on that spectrum, by specialty segment, against teams running comparable models, giving you a more realistic target to act on.
Sequencing is critical and it gets skipped constantly. There's no point chasing turn rate while a third of the fleet is incomplete, and incomplete assets shouldn't be counted against the field, because they can't serve a case anyway. Priorities have a dependency order.
The other half of the job is telling you what isn't achievable. Some of your goals need a technology change and some just need enforcement and separating those appropriately makes them achievable.
Four days or four months
The same method runs at different depths, and the right depth depends on the decision in front of you, not a template. Maybe there's an M&A just closed, and now master data cleanup has to happen at the same time you're standing up a new selling model to fit the combined portfolio. Maybe leadership already committed to moving off a multi-decade distributor model and going direct, and the plan for people, process, and technology doesn't exist yet — you're managing change management in theory, without an execution plan in practice. Sometimes the need is even more specific: an FDA recall requiring recovery of devices that were never properly catalogued in the first place, or an ERP upgrade that needs architecture built for med device, not retrofitted for it.
One manufacturer ran FOVA in full — globally, across every business unit, over about four and a half months. Complexity scoring by division, integration architecture, wave sequencing, governance, and a business case built entirely from their own operational data instead of industry benchmarks. That work identified more than $100 million in annual value.
Another manufacturer wanted four days. Corporate objectives, KPI ownership, a walk through policy and process built to drive revenue on less opex, with one constraint: minimal disruption to a sales force absorbing an entirely new product portfolio.
Both are the same method. The only difference is how far down you need to go before you trust the number enough to act on it.
That's the part most companies skip — they set the target, then start executing against it in the same breath. Four days is enough time to find out which of your goals are actually achievable and which ones you're chasing for the wrong reasons, before you've spent a quarter finding out the hard way. If you want that answer ahead of your next planning cycle, reach out and we'll scope the four-day version first.
Actually selling more, with less
We're not going to tell you your target is wrong because we'd prefer a different one. We'll show you where the industry compares, what has to happen before, and how long it took for organizations with similar priority to come anywhere near and with what resources. If you’ll let us in deeper, we’ll help plot your journey in as much detail as you need...your med device Michelin star recipe in full.
Then you decide. Cook as is or add a bit of your own seasoning.
About the Author
