Innovation of the Week: Spotlight on Innovative Companies
Posted by: meikah | 27 October 2011 | 7:31 pm
This week’s edition of innovation update celebrates the companies that have embraced and sustained innovation in their respective organizations.
These companies, among which are International Business Machines Corp., Novartis AG, Intel Corp., Abbott Laboratories, Xerox Corp. and runners-up Hewlett-Packard Co. and Yahoo Inc., are the winners of The Wall Street Journal’s Technology Innovation Awards this year.
- Does the innovation break with conventional ideas or processes in its field?
- Does it go beyond marginal improvements on something that already exists?
- Will it have a wide impact in its field or on future technology?
Filed under: Innovation, Innovation Update, Novartis, Xerox Corporation
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Six Sigma and Lean for Pharmaceuticals
Posted by: meikah | 4 March 2009 | 10:23 pm
I’m both surprised and worried when I stumbled upon iSixSigma‘s article, which says that for pharmaceuticals, compliance is not a true quality practice. And that their quality programs are 15 to 20 years old already. This means they are not up to date.
Isn’t this a bit alarming? We are talking about pharmaceuticals. These are the companies that bring us products for our health and well-being.
Perhaps these pharmaceuticals had not been updating their quality programs because they don’t have the right guidance and perspective. Six Sigma and Lean can do that for them.
Going back to the article, it says that Six Sigma is an opportunity for operations and quality professionals to modernize quality practices.
By improving process capability, Six Sigma sets the stage for leaner organizations. As published in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing in fall, 2004, Novartis has cut costs by 40 percent and improved cycle-times by 70 percent at its site in Suffern, New York. The company has done it by applying Lean principles not only in the direct labor areas but in supporting functions like quality, IT and maintenance. It has eliminated the need for supervisors by integrating those functions into line teams. Six Sigma is entirely compatible in that it removes the roots causes of deviations which otherwise slow up processes and add to overhead costs.
Read more about how pharmaceuticals can use Six Sigma and lean to improve their operations.
