EDITORIAL
Lean Packaging
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Are you looking for ways to trim costs? Then lose the wait, among others things.
This insight and more comes from Kornelija Zgonc, who spoke recently about continuously improving pharma operations by eliminating costly waste.
As vice president of functional excellence at Invitrogen (Carlsbad, CA), Zgonc looks for quantifiable ways to improve operations. Invitrogen markets workflow solutions for genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics, and cell cultures. Zgonc spoke at the Future Pharma Congress sponsored by Virtus International in Daytona Beach, FL, in December 2006.
To effect change, Zgonc suggested adopting lean manufacturing principles. “Lean knowledge can be applied at all levels, not only manufacturing,” she says. “Systematic problem solving is not a new principle; however, using it requires a cultural change.”
Manufacturing and packaging operations are ideal for lean deployment. She says that waste can be addressed by:
• Lowering defects.
• Eliminating overproduction.
• Decreasing waiting time.
• Reducing transactions.
• Decreasing unwanted motion.
• Lowering inventory.
• Shortening transportation.
“Whenever the products are waiting for the next manufacturing step, waiting to be packaged or waiting to be shipped, we are wasting our resources,” Zgonc said.
PMP News editorial advisory board member Nick Fotis says that adopting lean principles “is a significant push for packaging professionals at this time.” But change isn’t always easy. As director of Cardinal Health’s Packaging Technology Center, he says that almost all continuous process improvements that involve packaging process changes require revalidation of the package itself. “We have one project in particular that is consolidating corrugated carton sizes. It is requiring us to go back and ensure that just a slight change to headspace of the box does not cause any flex cracking of the unit package given the greater potential for product movement.”
Cardinal Health’s approach is to combine lean principles and Six Sigma. “The packaging group is generally called into a project team led by a ‘belt’ to act as a technical expert. Many times the black belts are somewhat in the dark with regard to packaging requirements and the difficulty and engineering involved in the initial development of the package and what is involved in making changes.”
“To get started, companies first have to know what needs changing through a detailed understanding of the value- and non-value-added activities,” Zgonc says. Highly efficient companies can have as much as 80% of their activities add value to their operations. “We have a tremendous opportunity to remove non-value-added activities in our processes. Knowing where the opportunities are through value stream maps is the first step to becoming a highly efficient operation,” Zgonc said during a roundtable on manufacturing excellence. Such knowledge, she says, rests upon collecting and analyzing the right process data.
Daphne Allen
Editor
