Hello Everybuddy,

As we come to the close of our internships, I was reflecting on this phase and what I have learnt.

When Mark Bamforth, our sponsor at Genzyme, initially provided us with our project briefs and mentioned about World Class Manufacturing using Lean philosophy, I thought 'Oh no, not another cost cutting exercise for which we may be used as an excuse, as external voices validating the already made internal decisions, usually for firing people.... '

I couldn't have been more wrong!

Lean philosophy, developed by Japanese manufacturers, most notably Toyota, is about respect for people, empowerment and improvement. It aims for systematic reduction or elimination of waste, by making the process simpler, more focused on value creation for customer (and from customer's perspective) and by building 'Quality' into the process, not after. And most importantly, its about changing the behaviours and attitudes of people especially the front line/ shop floor staff towards their activiites. Lean gets the process improved by having the people working on it to suggest and implement the improvements. Lean philosophy at first glance seems to go against conventional wisdom (run your machines at peak load and make as much as possible per machine and per person) but is quite logical and blatantly clear in retrospect..... (an analogy is food service at a restaurant, for example, all good restaurants make to order, not by chopping all the onions on first day of week, making salad second day, putting the stock and boiling in the big pot on third day and making tons of one dish on the fourth day). And because of the increased productivity, improved performance, more cash coming in faster, people are not fired (hence my initial impression of Lean was wrong). People are also happier as they are part of the improvement process, are listened to and respected.

Along the way, I also learned about World Class Performance / Manufacturing in general as well as different attributes of it in relation to a biotech company, how everything is integrated and need to be taken into account holistically (although for implementation, one can choose to start small and in one place, then expand). Another key learning has been the creation of corporate dashboards, monitoring mechanisms that allow the leaders to make decisions in time and with relevant information at hand. Key learnings here were a). you get what you measure and b) measure things that help drive positive behaviours we want to encourage in the organization.

And ofcourse, along the way, thanks to my colleague Iain McDougall, I learnt why Apple is such a great company and why we admire it, namely, due to its innovations and customer intimacy (although sometimes you would do better by tying your apple products with a chain!).

I think Lean and World Class Manufacturing mechanisms can make Scotland compete with the economies where labour is cheaper, by simplifying the processes, innovation, and continuous improvements, by increasing productivity and unrelenting, uncompromising focus on quality.

+ Mubbasher.