Medysis Corp Leadership Case

Medysis Corp  Case Summary (Company Overview)

Medysis Corp was a privately held U.S-based medical device manufacturer, which was founded in 2002. Although still relatively small, this company was very profitable with revenues in 2008 reported to be $400 million. Its entrepreneurial culture had fostered innovative thinking across the company, so, numerous promising initiatives result were at various stages of development, which is from redesign to development of new systems. One of the project that Medysis develop at that time was a IntensCare project, a developing project by Medysis, which is a new remote monitoring system for use in hospital’s intensive care unit. In 2006, one of the R&D researcher had the idea for monitoring system that would collect data on patients in intensive care units and post it to an electronic database that could provide an integrated profile of a patient’s health. In 2007, the group was given $500.000 to be used for software development and ongoing product engineering network.

The board of Medysis saw early signs that growth was slowing, two well-known public competitors announced that they were prepared to compete with IntensCare. Therefore, In 2008, Art Beaumont, an aggressive new president was hired to sharpen strategic focus while preserving the innovative culture and re-stimulating rapid growth, Beaumont introduce a series of change. The company continued to be organized functionally, he created an Executive Committee consisting of 5 direct reports: the Vice President of sales and marketing, research & development, design and engineering, production, and administration.

The company also have a new parallel system for product development in which a “Core Team” of people assembled from all the critical functions worked together continuously to move a product from conceptual stage to final production.  For every core team, a project leader was designated to orchestrate its work, keep an eye on the complete project, secure resources for the team and serve as liaison to senior management. This concept forces people to look at the “Big Picture”. Moreover, Beaumont recognized that the management style of all executives would also have to change. He argue that the style has to become much more of a command-and control culture with an emphasis on technical excellence, it because the competition has become intense.

In 2008, Beaumont formalized a core team which consist of: Aaron Gerson, the R&D researcher who formulated the idea; Bret O’Brien, a manager in product engineering who focus on designing a high-quality product as quickly as he could; Jack Fogel, senior production manager that always make sure communication is happening to all function; Dipesh Mukerjee, who assigned to oversee the software design and development; Karen Baio, who represent Regulatory Affairs, her patience and persistence were well-known throughout the company; and Valerie Merz, who assigned to oversee the product launch and manage the P&L for the new product and had her own critical path to product launch.