JOINT REPLACEMENT INSTRUMENTATION GROUP LIMITED
Sheffield
Sheffield is situated in the north west of England, further north than Coventry, and is serviced by rail and motorway, and air links that are not extensive. The buildings of JRI were all used to their full extent, filled either with machines or utilised as office space. The company was moved to Sheffield because it is the home of stainless steel that is used in their products.
There are fifty-eight people employed at JRI Sheffield, though more are employed at other sites including a London site. The technical staff in Sheffield included two design engineers and one development engineer. The majority of staff are involved in the direct manufacture of the orthopaedic implants in which JRI specialises.
The founder of JRI, Mr. Furlong, was the first person to design metal hip replacements coated with Hydroxy-Apatite ceramic (HAC) that allowed physiological bonding between prosthesis and host bone, producing mineralised continuity. The company was begun to develop and manufacture his, and other peoples, designs. Today only JRI’s own designs of joint replacements are produced.
|
|
Titanium alloys are machined by hand, then holes are made in the cup to enable the fixation screws to articulate allowing the surgeon to choose a suitable area of bone to fix them into. Rough components are then polished with a progressively finer grain. The polishing process takes about one and a half hours, after which they are cleaned in a three stage ultrasonic type. Manual inspection for quality control occurs at this stage. The plastic insert is then added before another cleaning session is undergone to remove the adhesives. Now the HAC coating is sprayed on by a robot in a high temperature machine by an Argon-plasma gun. Stainless steel masks cover the areas that do not need HAC coating as it does not stick to the masks. Final quality and geometry checks are made by a CMM machine before gamma radiation sterilisation is performed by another company, when the replacements are delivered to the hospitals for use.
|
|
Different sizes and shapes of stems are produced and stocked by the hospitals to be chosen by the surgeon after X-raying the patient. Any problems that occur with implants are usually due to the surgeons using the wrong size and shape for that particular patient. Shape needs to vary marginally with increasing age as gait changes, and size is dependent largely on the patients body weight. That is why JRI places an advisory note in the box with every implant. The cost of a ‘kit’ for a total hip replacement is around £1000. The surgeon also requires a set of specialised tools that are also made by JRI, although these are loaned by the company and not sold to surgeons.
The volume of this business in terms of turnover is not massive, but then its overheads are in line with that, and therefore JRI would probably not need to sell as many implants as Jaguar would need to sell cars in order to cover their design, development and production costs. Therefore I would assume that JRI would see a profit sooner than Jaguar, although that would not be as large after a longer period of time because JRI are selling to a smaller, more specialised market.