Cook Medical is starting with its customers’ needs and working backward to restructure the way its sales, marketing, research and development and customer service teams work — all without a single layoff.
Nearly 4,000 employees — about one-third of the Cook Medical global workforce — will soon have new job responsibilities when working with physicians, surgeons, hospitals and the company’s other customers. Cook Medical’s plan to rework its organizational structure creates new teams while consolidating others, all in the service of responding to customer and employee feedback, according to Pete Yonkman, president of Cook Group and Cook Medical.
Cook Medical employs nearly 2,500 people at its world headquarters on the west side of Bloomington. Job responsibilities for a majority of those employees, who are involved in production efforts, will not be affected by the restructuring announcement.
Yonkman said the global attempt at greater collaboration is a logical next step in the company’s ongoing transformation.
“What it really is, is a sort of complete overhaul of our customer-facing employees,” Yonkman said. “We spent a lot of time going out and listening to our external teams, people in the field and our customers. They told us we were structured wrong.”
A primary facet of the restructuring is that Cook Medical’s current 10 strategic business units will merge into two teams: the Med-Surg and Vascular divisions.