I’m going to start this blog with a post on the topic of “lean.” The reason why I’m starting here is that I’m currently writing an article on this topic for an upcoming issue of “Pharmaceutical Manufacturing.” This article will be a sequel to two published articles that I wrote some years ago:
The Impact of Inventory Turns on Speed, Quality, and Costs
How Lean is Pharma?: A 10-Year Progress Report
Before going any further, I recommend reading these two articles to better understand why inventory turns are a reliable indicator to measure a company’s leanness. The trend of inventory turns over time indicates how well a company is progressing in terms of becoming more Lean and improving its processes.
The upcoming article will be a sequel to the second article listed above, and will look at how much progress the Pharma industry in the years since the article was published in 2010. The article will review the data and provide some insights as to what is happening and why. A follow-up article will be published that discussed what can be done about the situation. It may surprise you to learn that little progress has been made in the pharmaceutical industry.
What may surprise you even more is that it has become exceedingly difficult to find examples of companies that have demonstrated sustainable progress with lean. More on that in the next post.
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