Cook Details Major Realignment
The president of Bloomington-based Cook Medical says changes to the company’s organizational structure will drive more rapid technology innovation and continued growth. Cook is restructuring from 10 business units to two divisions, a move that will impact sales, marketing, research and development, and customer service functions. It will also establishing new distribution channel management and medical education teams.
In an interview with Inside INdiana Business, Pete Yonkman said the realignment will not result in any layoffs. He adds the move decision-making closer to Cook’s customers.
"We really set about this project because healthcare’s changing so fast, almost on a daily basis. Hospital systems are getting bigger. Physicians are working in more collaborative and team environments," said Yonkman. "So we spent the last year or so really listening intently to our customers and to our external teams and what we heard from them was that the world has changed and we really needed to rethink how we were structured and how we were servicing our customers."
The new divisions: MedSurg and Vascular. The company says the move will create a more streamlined contracting process for customers and provide flexibility to better align sales teams to specific customer needs.
The Vascular division combines Cook’s former aortic intervention, peripheral intervention, interventional radiology and lead management businesses into one team, while the MedSurg division includes six teams serving customers in critical care, endoscopy, otolaryngology/head and neck surgery, reproductive health, surgery, and urology clinical specialties.
Other key changes in the restructuring effort include:
- Customer Support and Delivery: All global customer support centers and distribution centers are now centralized under one leadership team to improve customer service and develop innovative solutions that create supply chain efficiency.
- Distribution Channel Management: A new global team has been established to maintain our commitment to fully compliant and ethical access of Cook Medical products and to work with third party distributors improving distributor support and distribution channels to serve patients globally.
- Research & Development: Engineering reorganized to form a dedicated Research and Development team that actively listens to the needs of customers and develops products that improve the efficiency and effectiveness of patient care.
- Medical Education: A new global team has been created, pulling expertise from across the company to improve and support Vista, Cook Medical’s comprehensive educational product training program for customers.
Yonkman says Cook’s previous structure limited growth opportunities.
"When your customers change and if you get any misalignment with your customers, it makes you incredibly inefficient both for yourself and for your customers," Yonkman said. "We think this new structure really makes us more efficient and at the same time, it makes our customers more efficient."
Yonkman says the restructuring effort has already started and should be fully implemented by the end of the year.
Yonkman says the realignment will move decision-making closer to Cook’s customers.
Yonkman says the way Cook was previously structured was limiting the company’s ability to grow.