Lilly and Company is a leading pharmaceutical company whose products address the most urgent medical needs. It is known for manufacturing the best-in-class and first-in-class medicines for depression, schizophrenia, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, diabetes, osteoporosis, among others.
When it adopted Six Sigma methodoloy early this year, the company changed the way its employees work. By the company’s history, this could be the most expensive endeavor so far. Yet it is not relenting. Last March, the company had trained 200 employees into Black Belts. By the end of the year, Lilly hopes to to achieve cost savings equal to 2%-3% of annual revenue. “That represents anywhere from $280 million to $420 million in cost cuts, with the higher estimate equivalent to annual sales of Lilly’s ninth- best-selling drug,” the report says.
Thus far, Lilly’s Six Sigma teams have finished about 60 projects out of several hundred that have been launched. The company assigned more than half its black belts to projects in sales and in research and development. Among the completed projects are:
1. Making the Lilly Cares drug discount program for low- income patients easier to use. One change: reducing by half the number of questions a patient must answer on the application.
2. Streamlining the manufacturing line for a product sold by the Elanco animal health division to allow production to be increased without a major capital investment.
3. Decreasing by about 40 percent the time Lilly sales representatives in Mexico, Canada, Brazil and Japan spent on administrative tasks. A similar project is aimed at the U.S. sales force.
4. Saving $1 million a year by restructuring the neuroscience products customer call center. The changes let Lilly reduce its costly use of a contract call center.
Lilly Breaks Out the Black Belts
