CPL presented its Creating a Lean Culture in Pharma webinar on 18 August at 2pm London / 3pm CET time.
“We want smaller batches, more often” is a statement that you would generally not hear in a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility. Intuitively, this would require more batch records, more set up, more cleaning, more material movement, more testing and more quality review, so why on earth would anyone want to do this? This is where Pharma and Lean often differ in their approach to production.
At Contract Pharmaceuticals Limited, we have been working to change this paradigm. We have created a Lean culture within our organisation and are now moving towards smaller batches more often with lead times of 3-4 weeks rather than the industry standard of 3-4 months.
Our Lean journey started approximately 10 years ago with organisational changes and several kaizen projects across the organisation. Five years ago, we created a Director of Continuous Improvement role, reporting directly to the CEO, to support the next phase of our Lean journey. With this full-time position in place, we were able to increase our focus on Lean company-wide and develop a culture that will allow us to become a Lean leader within the pharmaceutical industry.
All CPL employees have completed a two-day Lean overview training program which helped create the foundation for our most important project to date. We developed a process to reduce the lead time for certain products from 3 months to 3 weeks. The team leading this was called the “Lean Leads” and their mantra was “never short-dated and never out of stock.” This webinar will focus on our Lean journey, how lean principles can be applied within a pharmaceutical manufacturing operation, and how we using our lean knowledge to reduce our lead times.
Presented by Darren Vanderburgh
Darren Vanderburgh has 30 years of experience in operations and has been practising or teaching Lean principles for almost 25 years. After 20 years in the Office Furniture industry, Darren has spent the past 10 years working in the Pharmaceutical industry at Contract Pharmaceuticals Limited. After 5 years of operational leadership positions, he has spent the past 5 years as the Director of Continuous Improvement where he spends his time working across the organisation on business improvement projects and Lean education.
