Leading Pharmaceutical Operational Excellence by Thomas Friedli Prabir Basu Daniel Bellm & Jürgen Werani

Author:Thomas Friedli, Prabir Basu, Daniel Bellm & Jürgen Werani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg

What Are the Main Objectives an OPEX Structure Has to Fulfill?

Over the last years, a search for excellence could be observed in most industries. Besides the introduced excellence models in Chap.​ 2, Peters and Waterman (1982) identified eight attributes that characterize excellent, innovative companies. Peters and Austin (1985) condensed these findings into four critical success factors: (1) people who practice; (2) care of customers; (3) constant innovation; and (4) leadership which binds together the first three factors by the attendance of management at all levels of an organization (Dahlgaard-Park and Dahlgaard 2007). These factors provide us with a basis, but conclusions regarding the organizational structure are hard to derive from these success factors alone. Therefore, we describe the characteristics of OPEX which allows us to derive the main objectives an OPEX structure has to fulfill.

OPEX characteristics. Beside the well-known technical aspects of OPEX, like Preventive Maintenance in TPM or the Pull System in JIT, the holistic St.Gallen understanding with its Effective Management System (see Chap.​ 2) also provides a social aspect. Specific characteristics like employee involvement, continuous improvement or qualification make OPEX work and enable a sustainable implementation. Most characteristics, technical and social, are interconnected. Based on Pettersen (2009) and our understanding, we take team organization, cross-functional training, employee involvement, continuous improvement and high qualification as key elements of an OPEX-orientated organization (Pettersen 2009; Doppler and Lauterburg 2008).

Team organization. The percentage of employees working in multifunctional teams is much higher in OPEX initiatives than in traditional work organizations. A multifunctional team is a group of employees who is able to perform many different tasks (Karlsson and Åhlström 1996). Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Total Quality Management (TQM) and Just-in-Time (JIT) all require a strong focus on teamwork. TPM does not only focus on technical aspects like reliability, but also on engaging all employees in maintenance-related activities. Similar to TQM at which every employee, throughout different departments and hierarchical levels, should be concerned with quality thinking. In a JIT system, a worker cannot produce another unit until the worker at the next station signals that this other unit is needed. The output of each worker is therefore -both in terms of volume and quality – strictly linked to the output of the other workers in the section. Workers have to act as a team, rather than as individuals (Forza 1996).

Cross-functional training. Employees are usually cross-trained to increase their understanding of a process in its entirety, and make them flexible with regards to the changing needs of customers (Nahm et al. 2003). In JIT, for example, each worker must be cross-trained to perform several tasks so that employees can work wherever they are needed (Forza 1996). As a consequence, employees become more self-managing than in a command-and-control environment. Each team is given the responsibility of performing all the tasks along this part of the product flow. This means that the number of tasks in the group increases. At the same time, the use of multifunctional teams decreases the number of job classifications. Instead

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