The Next Sound You Hear

Getting Good

When Austin first learned to do custom ear-molding for hearing aids in the ’60s, he soon learned an industry fact of life that is still true today—people don’t want to wear hearing aids. So he set out to make hearing aids small and comfortable, particularly by continuing to refine Starkey’s custom-fitting capability

By the time Ruzicka joined Starkey in 1977 as a 21-year-old repair technician, it was an $8 million company that had just set up its first foreign subsidiary in England. “Starkey was the best at making custom hearing aids at the time,” Ruzicka says. “But we weren’t really good at making them. We had high repair rates.” Austin quickly recognized Ruzicka’s knack for organizing people and processes. After two weeks on the job, 21-year-old Ruzicka was a supervisor; a month later, he was managing his department. He was made production manager soon thereafter—and quickly shrank Starkey’s two-week order turnaround time to three days.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan ordered a pair of Starkey Intra Canal hearing aids. Thanks to this high-profile purchase, Starkey’s sales doubled overnight—and its production systems became stressed. “What that really taught us is we were pretty good at making hearing aids, and we had to become great at doing it,” Ruzicka says. One key move was adopting just-in-time manufacturing processes: “I thought it would be the only way to manage growth as well as quality.”

By age 29, Ruzicka was vice president of manufacturing, and led Starkey in re-engineering its entire manufacturing systems from inefficient batch processing—where a batch of 50 hearing aids went through a 50-step process one step at a time—to a synchronous process where each moves through as an individual order. (In a batch process, an individual device may be “finished,” but it has to wait for the others before it can move on to the next step.) “We got so good at this that we reduced our service level to one day,” Ruzicka says. Starkey had given itself a three-year goal of attaining this level of efficiency—instead, it took just a little more than 12 months.

To illustrate how well Ruzicka develops efficient processes, Larry Miller, Starkey’s vice president of human resources, shows off a staffing tool that Ruzicka developed over the course of a few weeks. A simple Excel spreadsheet, its built-in formulas correlate orders with staff in each department, so that each department can see at a glance whether they’re going to be over- or understaffed, and adjust accordingly.

“As a private company, people are our biggest asset, and our biggest expense,” Miller says. “Jerry develops tools to communicate corporate performance so that everyone can understand where we are, where we’re going, and how do I fit in.”

By the end of the ’80s, Starkey had expanded substantially in Europe and was broadening its tooling and mechanical skills in order to develop products at a faster rate. As the industry moved toward digital hearing aids in the early ’90s, Ruzicka realized he needed in-house R&D capabilities to keep Starkey’s competitive edge. That meant attracting new talent.