AstraZeneca’s Culture of Empowerment

This quick, one-time registration gives you access to members-only site benefits. VP of Manufacturing Ron Matthews and his team are establishing a closer connection between operations staff and the patients their products reach. They’re also training them to find and utilize opportunities for improvement. This is an excerpt from an article that will appear in November/December’s issue of Pharmaceutical Manufacturing. If you teach someone to fish . . . When AstraZeneca was formed five years ago, the company decided that it needed to change the way it had approached quality and operational excellence. Instead of diving head first into Six Sigma, or deploying small armies of Green and Black Belts, manufacturing management decided to train operations and quality staff to apply DMAIC principles every day, to measure and improve performance through cross-functional “continuous improvement” (CI) teams. Two years ago, at Westborough, Mass., cross-functional CI teams involving QA, engineering and operations applied DMAIC principles to solve a major capacity crunch for a key product. Even though Pull Manufacturing had not yet been implemented at the site, the teams uncovered wasteful processes, effectively adding 20 million extra units of capacity per year. “A capital investment of less than $100,000 led to $60 million to $70 million in revenue gains — without adding staff,” says Ron Matthews, vice president of manufacturing and supply chain management. Workgroups have been restructured so that supervisors are very close to the work itself, and teams focus on specific operations. “We’ve engaged operators so that they become owners of the process,” says Matthews. “They feel empowered, have more energy and confidence.” This approach is now carrying over into hiring and recruitment. For example, a new blister packaging line in Newark, Del., involved a novel, much faster process that demanded a new approach to staffing. “Before, we would have