The box redesign helped reduce transit times, but not enough to knock off a full day. So the team next looked inside the factory for time savings.

They found that production planning in Galway resulted in product becoming available for sterilization by an outside contractor at the end of the day. That meant the stents weren't ready to ship until the next afternoon. The second challenge, therefore, was to make the stents available earlier so the forwarder could pick them up and airfreight them out on the same day. "To do this, we needed to create logistics success through the collaboration of disciplines," Hines says.

Those disciplines—logistics, manufacturing, and production planning —worked together to modify production schedules to make product available earlier in the day. That proved to be an operations balancing act that required all involved to be fully on board. "The Galway plant was already producing other products, and now this new blockbuster was competing with our base business," recalls Weinstein-Millson. "This is where our philosophy of making sure we're working with all levels companywide to improve performance really paid off."

Once new planning and production rules had been established, Galway negotiated with the sterilizer to move up processing times for TAXUS. That was another big win. "Due to optimized production planning and the successful sterilization negotiation, freight is now processed and tendered to the airline in time for a same-day flight to Boston," Hines says. "Again, this was all accomplished by picking up a phone or sitting around a table with our partners—good old-fashioned communication."

By that point, the team had met its goal of shipping more TAXUS stents much faster. But there was one more issue to address if they wanted to maintain their newfound momentum.

The devices must fully comply with U.S. Customs and FDA export/import regulations, but the sharp increase in TAXUS shipments could potentially have led to delays. "Sudden you had a massive import volume coming into the U.S. that wasn't there before," says Hines. "Imports of this scale weren't on anyone's radar a few years ago. But once things started to roll in from Galway, we quickly realized that this is a critical function." Given the impact compliance could have on transit times, the company decided to bring in an import/export specialist who would keep all the T's crossed and the I's dotted.

Now that all the pieces are in place—pallet space optimized, production and sterilization completed earlier, shipments ready for same-day flights, and Customs and FDA entries filed on the front end—TAXUS typically can clear Customs and FDA before a flight arrives and be delivered to the DC the next day, effectively a two-day transit time. (Holidays push current average transit times to 2.5 days.)

Throughout the course of their project, Hines and Weinstein-Millson found that nothing was more important to successfully implementing change than picking up a phone or sitting around a table to work through an issue with a trusted partner.

Today, says Weinstein-Millson, it's easy to overlook the fundamentals of communication. "Before you install technology, you have to have people and process," she observes. "From a logistics standpoint, we're only people and process. Technology comes last."

That may sound simple, but adhering to those fundamentals can have a broad impact, Weinstein-Millson continues. The benefits that came out of the TAXUS project were so great, in fact, that Boston Scientific is implementing those logistics best practices companywide.

"The business rules need to be simple, quantifiable, and scalable to make sure that everyone is speaking the same transportation and logistics language around the world," says Hines. "And with this project, that's what we've done."