I’m already half way through my third week here and preparing to wrap things up before heading to Jurong next Saturday. I can’t believe it. Truth is I’m feeling a little bit sad. Don’t get me wrong, I can’t see myself phoning Dale from Singapore, crying, begging to come back to Montrose. But I’ve really enjoyed my time here.

So firstly, apologies for not updating last week. I was having a little trouble with connection.

When I first applied for this placement the project was ambiguously described as “performance management: comparing practises at both sites and commenting on best practise” with no mention of what “performance” it intended me to compare. But as I mentioned before Dale is pretty keen for me to take my own slant on this and pretty much given me free reign on how I approach it.

So to begin with, I’m working in the Operation Excellence (OE) department who’s role is to explore ways in which the company could improve in efficiency and then facilitate change in this direction. Coming from a psychology perspective (and knowing nothing about the technical or manufacturing side of ANYTHING let alone pharmaceutical processes) my automatic assumption was that “performance management” referred to the professional development of GSK employees: examining the training they were given, the processes they go through everyday and the options they’re given to advance within the company. I wasn’t wrong. But this is only one aspect of what OE encompasses.

Luckily though, Dale was quite happy to let me focus on this. OE has just recently rolled out a new initiative across the site based on the principles of Lean Sigma, and knowing that this is the current “improvement philosophy” adopted by many businesses (it had come up several times in literature I’d been reading in preparation for the dreaded Case Interview) I was keen to see, firstly, exactly what it entailed and then compare how it had been implemented at both sites.

In simple terms that even a statistics-adverse psychology student could understand, Lean Sigma is an all-encompassing way of working that employs several tools to improve on process efficiency. These range from things I understand like 5 S – which effectively is a standardised way of arranging your work station across site – to vastly horrible looking statistics I feel eight weeks is insufficient for grasping. The main thing to take away is that Lean Sigma is thorough. A lot of the principles are simple and intuitive, but it forces people to work in a very specific way – to take the long route and cover all bases, thus minimising the likelihood of making an error.

Initially though, this will seem for a lot of people like a lot of extra work. And this is were I come in. Lean Sigma isn’t just about using new tools. It’s about totally changing the way you work. It relies on a complete change in working culture to sustain it. So my task for these eight weeks is to examine people’s reactions to Lean Sigma here and in Singapore. My hypothesis is that Singapore has developed a culture that is more compliant than ours and this will make them more open to an initiative that is almost like a philosophy.

When western businessmen first approached Toyota in the early eighties – the company from which Lean Sigma was bourn – they questioned why the Japanese were so open with them and willing to share the secrets of their success. "Because”, smiled one in reply, "We know you won’t do it!”

Western society praises individualism and is automatically suspicious of anything that tries to standardise one’s way of approaching things. Can something so fiercely indoctrinating ever be maintained in a Western work place? Can it be tailored so that people are less likely to be hostile to it? Hopefully I’ll have an answer in 5 weeks.

In the meantime, I’ve spent my time here going round all the departments getting a qualitative feel for the mood on site. Not just towards Lean Sigma, I’m very interested to know why people are motivated to work here. If you can further that, could you not convince more people to get behind your new direction?

What is immediately interesting is how few people cite the GSK vision of “Helping people do more; feel better and live longer”. Now, coming from a Guardian-reading, vegetarian lefty background, I was sceptical too. My friends were surprised I’d accepted the placement. I mean, pharmaceutical companies are meant to be regarded with suspicion. What’s their real agenda? They profit on people being sick.

And now I’d be the first to defend them. My experience here has opened my eyes to how unfair an accusation this is. I’d always tolerated their existence, being of the opinion that they employed highly-skilled molecular biologists and so on who worked really hard and therefore deserved to be paid. Plus it’s better to have this research and development of medicines going on than not. Money in academia is stretched enough, if we left it to the government to fund we’d make very slow process yadeyadada…

What is truly surprising though is the extent to which GSK invest in developing and creating medicines that they stand to lose a lot of money on.

Nothing is more potent an example than the money they’re throwing into swine flu. Montrose manufactures the Relenza API and all across the site you’re reminded of it – new buildings have been prepped to take on the mammoth load of raw materials needed to create as much as possible, people are preparing to take on 24hr shifts. The whole site is preparing to go into overdrive to create as much as possible should they have to suddenly meet increased demand in response to the situation getting worse.

Moreover at R&D sites, a huge amount of investment has gone into developing a vaccine that hopefully no one will need.

It’s easy to be cynical – yes they stand to make a huge amount on a pandemic. But if you were thinking only in terms of profitability the moves they’ve made in response to Swine Flu could prove to be suicidal.

All in all I feel I’ve gained more commercial experience in these few weeks than I ever could have taking a business course. It’s been really encouraging to be able to apply psychology in such a practical setting.

Whether Dale actually gets anything out of it though remains to be seen.

Until next week,

Cally