Case Study 2 – Pharmaceutical

Our client is a major healthcare company with over 26,000 employees and is a world leader in the development of insulin to combat diabetes.

Scope:
A recent innovative insulin product had been approved for market and was experiencing steep increases in volume sales. LMR was asked to diagnose methods in which the production line could be enhanced to meet the increased demand.

Application:
LMR began the project with a rigorous analysis of the whole value chain using a Value Stream Map. A further analysis of the capacity of each automated station led to the application of OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) on the bottleneck process.

Initial data collection demonstrated that the bottleneck could shift between three automated stations on the production line depending on the variants.

In order to protect the customer at all costs – defects in the field of healthcare can have repercussions beyond those in other industries – LMR built a customised deployment of Lean which prioritised the principles of Jidoka (no defects forward).

Building on the foundational work of OEE and TPM (Total Productive Maintenance) to drive capacity and stabilise production volume, LMR embarked on the application of error proofing, escalation processes and Information Centres to capture problems and investigate the root cause.

After 20 weeks the project was deemed by the customer to have been a success with all KPIs having been met in accordance with the initial scoping of the project.

Results:
Capacity improvement of 42% on the overall production line.

ROI on LMR resource 18:1.