The Half-Billion Dollar Solution

The Situation
At “Pharma-C Pharmaceuticals,”* one of the most critical business units is Vaccine Packaging.  At this unit hundreds of employees produce vaccines for many diseases - placing vaccines into vials or syringes and packaging them for the market. 

In 2007, Pharma-C launched several new vaccines, with revenues projected to double from the previous year. They were forecasting a 60% increase in units produced and strong market demand.

However, Value Stream Mapping revealed that the packaging unit posed a serious bottleneck - production line performance was inconsistent, and overall efficiency was well below that of competitors. The unit was faced with many challenges - there had recently been a new labor agreement with which many packaging operators were unhappy as well as an influx of many new, inexperienced supervisors and employees. In addition, quality assurance reports showed too many deviations in product quality, purity, or sterility.  Further complicating things, the current culture was complacent and resistant to change, and the unit had a long history of providing too many overtime opportunities to employees. So improvements inefficiency would mean less pay.

To successfully meet the expected demand, the company knew they needed to improve quality and capacity on three large vaccine packaging production lines.

The Solution
To fix the packaging bottleneck, the company decided to team their Lean Six Sigma initiative with CLG's Performance Catalyst®.  CLG's coaches helped leaders select and pinpoint specific behaviors needed to achieve the business opportunities and associated metrics highlighted by Lean Six Sigma. Together they developed behavior-based action plans for the entire department. Those plans aligned behaviors with the continuous improvements of Lean Six Sigma. And all leaders were trained in giving positive and constructive feedback.

The Results
The company was able to make available to the market an additional $500 million of critical vaccine doses per year. But what excited Pharma-C's leadership even more than the number improvements was that this brought about sustainable culture change. Supervisors acted more like leaders, operators felt more cared for, and clarity of direction sharply improved. And, in addition to achieving several measurable targets with sustained results, Pharma-C's vaccine backlog plummeted to virtually zero at the beginning of 2008.

*a pseudonym

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