Trelleborg’s Healthcare & Medical Rapid Development Center

Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical has launched its Rapid Development Center in Delano, Minnesota. This will provide Trelleborg’s global healthcare and medical customers a single partner for design, rapid prototyping, development, and serial production, ensuring cost control and scalability of customers’ solutions.

Trelleborg created the Rapid Development Center in response to customer needs to accelerate time to market, reduce the production cost of parts already in market, and improve the transition from design to serial production. The center features dedicated equipment and personnel possessing decades of combined experience and expertise in all areas of medical device component manufacturing. It enables healthcare and medical customers to work with design, materials, and quality experts throughout the entire life cycle of a project.

Chris Tellers, director of the Rapid Development Center, says: “For healthcare and medical customers that want to be the first to market with innovative technologies, Trelleborg’s team at the Rapid Development Center can create samples in days, enabling multiple design iterations to be tested to confirm production can be effectively and rapidly scaled up.

“Working with our customers earlier in the product development cycle enables us to help them save time, reduce costs, and produce higher-quality parts; all while keeping in mind the long-term goal of serial production. Employing Design for Manufacturing (DfM) principles, ensures processes that are efficient and cost-effective in high volumes, helping to alleviate the 80% to 90% of manufacturing costs that are usually designed into a product.

Scroll to continue with content

“Because we focus on rapid development and not just prototyping, we’ll have conversations with the customer so we can deliver a product with superior performance and quality. The Rapid Development Center is a relational environment as opposed to a transactional one, where we take a consultative approach to help customers discover what they need and how it can be realized. Trelleborg has multiple decades of experience manufacturing silicones, thermoplastics, and metals. Our experts leverage their expertise, look at complex designs and quickly create prototypes and tooling that help customers achieve their goals.”

The Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical Rapid Development Center comprises several core competencies critical to medical device and pharmaceutical component development, including design, consultation, toolmaking, prototyping, high-precision machining, silicone molding, thermoplastic molding, automation, assembly, and secondary operations. By using Trelleborg’s manufacturing facilities, customers have access to raw material traceability, Class 7 cleanrooms, and established validation processes. These facilities are ISO 13485:2016 and ISO 9001 certified and meet requirements from the Food and Drug Administration and European Medical Device Regulation. Trelleborg leverages its manufacturing expertise and long-term vision to transform customer ideas from design to global, long-term production, quickly and affordably.