A medical equipment maker assembles monitors, suction units, bedside devices and similar machines from bought-in parts, tests each one and services it in hospitals. The test bench and the field engineer decide its name.
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Share your requirementsA medical equipment maker designs or assembles patient monitors, suction pumps, nebulisers, infusion devices or steam sterilisers. Boards, pumps, housings and sensors are bought in, then fitted, wired, calibrated and run on a test bench before packing. Many units also sell service contracts, so engineers travel to hospitals and clinics to install, train ward staff and repair. Orders come from dealers, hospital tenders and government supply. A small design and assembly team often holds all the product knowledge, and a service engineer who knows the machine well is easy for a dealer or rival to hire away. Related reading: pharma and life sciences HR.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
The person who tuned the design or repaired the first units knows faults nobody recorded, and when he leaves, field problems take far longer to solve.
An engineer standing in an ICU or theatre decides on the spot what to repair, replace or tell the nurses, with little supervision.
A technician who builds and tests the same unit can pass faults he would catch on a colleague's work, and bench records get filled in afterwards.
A tender means weeks of overtime and hurried hiring of technicians, followed by quiet months when the same people sit idle.
Hospital staff and dealer technicians hear different instructions, and the same avoidable faults keep reaching the service desk.
A small raise from a dealer takes away an engineer along with the customer contacts and machine knowledge.
Assembly staff and field engineers compare allowances and travel time, and resentment builds when field overtime goes unrecorded.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Retention and Attrition Management; Learning and Development; Organisation Design. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for pharmaceuticals and life sciences, not in general.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a medical equipment makers business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Write what an assembly technician, a tester and a service engineer can each do alone, with names beside it.
What this coversHideWrite what an assembly technician, a tester and a service engineer can each do alone, with names beside it. Start from role design.
A named tester who did not build the unit signs the record at the bench, not later.
What this coversHideA named tester who did not build the unit signs the record at the bench, not later. This gives your performance reviews a real measure.
Stages from junior to lead, sign-off for each machine family, a log of call-outs and a short briefing on conduct in hospitals.
What this coversHideStages from junior to lead, sign-off for each machine family, a log of call-outs and a short briefing on conduct in hospitals. See the learning plan.
Machine, fault, fix, time taken and engineer, so what one person learns stays in the company.
What this coversHideMachine, fault, fix, time taken and engineer, so what one person learns stays in the company. HR reporting can show the patterns.
A shared list of expected orders, so hiring, overtime and training of temporary technicians are fixed well ahead.
What this coversHideA shared list of expected orders, so hiring, overtime and training of temporary technicians are fixed well ahead. Your hiring process can support it.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
A clear map of what bench technicians, testers and service engineers each own.
A staged path for service engineers, machine family by machine family.
A study of why trained engineers leave for dealers and rivals, and what would hold them.
Simple reporting on call-outs, overtime and exits across the bench and the field.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in pharmaceuticals and life sciences, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Why people leave pharma and life sciences roles, and how to ask about qualification, shifts, territory and quality culture in an exit conversation.
7 min readRead article
How to spot an unmanageable workload before it becomes an exit or an error, what to look at, how to talk about it and what to change, without guessing.
5 min readRead article
A calendar of courses, a budget spent by March and no record of what any of it changed. What a learning and development process contains when it starts from need rather than from the catalogue.
7 min readRead article
A flat structure works until the founder becomes the only route to a decision. How to tell when you have passed that point, and how to redesign without a reorganisation.
8 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Find out what the dealer offers beyond pay, mark machine expertise with a grade, and give engineers a growth path and a voice in training. Keep a record of who knows which machine.
A different named person signing the final test is safer. In a small team, rotate the testing so nobody signs off their own work.
Ask for a short note after each repair, review faults together monthly and put a junior beside the senior on real calls. In time this becomes your fault guide.
Plan with sales early, give extra hours to people who already know your units, and keep a list of reliable temporary technicians. Check employment arrangements with a qualified professional.
Give a brief induction on behaviour near patients, hygiene, permissions and talking to ward staff, then ask the hospital for feedback after visits.
We ask who alone can repair certain machines, read a month of test records to see who built and who signed, and count the field calls handled by one engineer. A skills map plus a service engineer ladder is a sensible start, and we agree scope with you in writing.
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