Medtronic describes itself as "the world's largest therapeutic device company, manufacturing biomedical devices for improved cardiovascular and neurological health "and as the world's leading medical technology company specializing in implantable and invasive therapies."

The list of options provided by OrgCon for describing a company's major activity are (1) production (2) service (3) retail and (4) wholesale; Medtronic was assigned to the first category. Several articles attest to the fact that Medtronic is not merely a retailer or wholesaler of biomedical products, but also a producer of these goods. It conducts its own research and development, designs, and manufacturers most of the products that it sells.

Classifying Medtronic's production technology is not an easy task. We don't know how many pace-makers, Medtronic's best-selling product and oldest product line, the company manufactures and sells in a given year. The larger that number, the more likely it is that the production technology is a mass production, that is, large batch or mass-produced technology. Furthermore, it is unlikely that Medtronic uses any process production technologies, that is, controlled, standardized and continuous processing. Unit production where units are custom made and work is non-routine seems to provide the best description.

What would perhaps be better is to describe its production technology as mass customization, a production process made possible by computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) technologies such as robots, numerically controlled machine tools, computerized software for product design, engineering analysis, and remote control of machinery. In the manufacturing systems, batch manufacturing (large or small) was used to achieve customization. Continuous processing was employed to produce a single standard product in very large quantities. The advent of CIM enables the best of both types of production: unlimited batch sizes with high levels of customization, decreased scrap rates, increased machine utilization, more product variety, and customer satisfaction.

Given that mass customization is not an option, we have chosen to select unit production and give it a low certainty factor.

Routine technology

There are several indications that Medtronic is not utilizing a routine technology. Among them are: the increasing sophistication, variety, and number of product offerings, its historical emphasis on path breaking R&D and its numerous and ongoing process redesigns and quality initiatives. Also to be considered are its passion for acquiring leading-edge companies - particularly innovative startups and its increasing participation in joint ventures and strategic alliances.

Divisibility

Divisibility is the degree to which tasks can be divided into smaller, relatively independent tasks and is an important consideration in the determination of appropriate organization structure. Technologies may be divisible along functional areas such as R&D, production, marketing, product lines, or between geographical regions.

The determination that Medtronic's technology is somewhat divisible recognizes that, while some of its major product lines share core technologies and processes, the differences among them are significant. Pacing products, which include Medtronic's flagship pacemakers and its newer tachyarrhythmia (rapid heart rate) management devices, employ integrated circuit (IC) technology. Neurological products include tremor control devices that also rely on IC technology. The Cardiac Surgery products, however, rely on a very different set of technologies, principally on bio-compatible materials, bio-resistant fibers, mechanical pumps, and tissue valves. These products appear to share a few characteristics with the vascular products such as catheters, stents, and balloon angioplasty devices, none of which are particularly electronic/electrical or mechanical in design. It does not appear that these technologies are divisible across functional areas within the organization but they do seem to be highly divisible across international boundaries.

Processes and technologies which are common to and divisible across all four product lines are those related to computer-aided design and manufacture (CAD/CAM), product data and information systems which support the design and development processes and other information technologies such as hardware and software.

Technology Dominance

Medtronic does not have a dominant technology. The company employs routine technologies in the production and manufacturing of its products and non-routine technologies in much of its R&D. The marketing, sales, and distribution of the products employ both technologies in varying proportions. Medtronic's core competence is its R&D.

Advanced information system

Managerial information systems (MIS) are employed to gather, process, analyze and distribute information necessary to operate an organization. Different organizational technologies require different information systems.
Medtronic employs many advanced information systems across many levels of the organizational hierarchy, product lines, and functional departments:

• A product data management system for the management of design and manufacturing information that allows users access to current and archived design documents throughout the entire company. It also ensures that only pre-approved designs are used in the manufacturing process, provides electronic appending of all relevant technical documents to designs, and maintains an audit trail of all design changes
• A Cray J916 supercomputer for its Center for Biomedical Research, which is used to perform "complex computational fluid dynamics and structural analysis simulations to develop new cardiovascular medical devices". This is reported to be both Medtronic's first supercomputer and the first Cray system in the biomedical industry to be used in medical device development and manufacturing
• The Pro/ENGINEER CAD/CAE system installed on a network of Sun Microsystems workstations, which links all Medtronic design departments in the Minneapolis headquarters to the company's Netherlands facilities, thereby permitting concurrent engineering. The system is used to support Medtronic's automated design-to-manufacturing process for pacemakers
• A relational database with advanced graphical software that allows its technical support specialists to track more than 1 million possible pacemaker and connector combinations

Medtronic is also the lead-user of a $700 million audio-teleconferencing center established by AT&T in Minneapolis.