Tegra Medical has experience beyond its years

PHOTO/COURTESY While Tegra Medical was founded nine years ago, it is comprised of a combination of companies and people with years of expertise in medical manufacturing.

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By Sam Bonacci

Tegra Medical has a depth of experience that belies its founding date of 2007.

The company is comprised of a number of manufacturing companies that had been serving the medical industry in various ways and were brought together by Boston investment firm Riverside Partners. Together, they formed Tegra Medical and have become more than the sum of their parts, providing a one-stop-shop for medical device manufacturing and prototyping that helps their customers remain agile and keep costs in check.

“Tegra is very well suited in terms of equipment, technology and expertise to support a lot of projects at the component level or multi-component level,” said Steve Burpee, president and chief operating officer of Tegra customer Burpee Materials Technology in Eatontown, N.J. “They are probably the best in the world at welding small bits of metal together, and they do it at commodity prices and with extremely high quality.”

Tegra Medical has grown its employees up to 320 from a starting point of 150 in 2007. That growth has been driven by an expanding list of customers to 30 market segments, said Bob Miller, Tegra's general manager.

“We manufacture a lot of metal and plastic components for a lot of the large medical OEMs of the world,” such as the screws used in knee and hip surgeries, Miller said. “Last year, the Franklin building shipped 26 million parts to 530 customers.”

Genesis Tech Center

The business isn't all about making parts, as Tegra helps companies make their visions a reality through the Genesis Tech Center. While many companies devote a percentage of resources to rapid prototyping, roughly 20 percent of the Tegra space and resources are devoted to this center in Franklin where 60 employees handle an ongoing rotation of roughly 70 projects.

“[Customers] will come to us with a drawing on a napkin or actual specifications,” said Miller.

The center offers a flexible, versatile rapid-response way to help customers with product development. One of the biggest challenges is getting products developed in a manner that balances speed and precision, and Tegra finds that balance, Burpee said.

“In my experience, they are the best at what they do,” Burpee said. “They are one of the reasons that the Northeast and Massachusetts are considered one of the regional leaders when it comes to medical technology.”

One supplier to rule them all

Tegra plans to keep that momentum moving forward as OEMs shed their suppliers and move towards those with a wider array of capabilities. To that end, the company has started injection and insertion molding so that it can produce all the plastic portions of its products in-house. This has contributed to allowing the company to make fully finished and sterilized devices going directly to customers.

Above all, the company pushes an orientation towards customer satisfaction as can be seen in the various areas it has chosen to grow over the years.

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