By Jason Dunklee, Practice Manger, Maxiom Group

[This post was first published on the Maxiom Group’s blog.]

I recently asked this question in LinkedIn’s Pharmaceutical Operational Excellence Group online forum, resulting in an enthusiastic and insightful dialogue.

Lean, Six Sigma and all of the other buzzwords under the umbrella of Operational Excellence are traditionally applied to activities linked directly to commercial production. More recently, administrative and service functions have also been targeted. So, why not R&D?

Clearly, there are a number of characteristics that differentiate R&D from other activities in a business. Some of these mentioned in the forum include:

• Passion for Learning – R&D staff need freedom to innovate and pursue their passion for learning.
• Nature of Innovation – Acquiring new knowledge requires doing things never previously done.
• Embracing Failure – For researchers, failed experiments can be as useful as successful ones.
• Inherent ROI Risk – You pay now for R&D but the return comes (hopefully) sometime in the distant future. Especially in life sciences, many research efforts never directly result in commercial products.

Those characteristics of R&D result in specific challenge for OE:

• Understanding Value – What is the value created by R&D? Can it be quantified? Who is the customer?
• Eliminating Waste – How can we apply this “lean thinking” to R&D? What constitutes non-value-adding activity in an R&D setting?
• Defining Core Processes – Beyond the scientific process, can R&D be characterized by recurring processes with inputs and outputs?
• Improving Flow – What “flows” in R&D? What metrics make sense?

So, where are the improvement opportunities that OE can deliver?

It seems a major focus should be on the core processes that integrate the individual and functional research efforts into the knowledge-based deliverables needed for the business. In other words, the real opportunity may not lie so much in doing tactical improvements such as 5S in a lab or upgrading an IT system, but rather in managing the creation of value at the program level – how do we coordinate all of the people, knowledge, requirements, processes, decisions and learning in an efficient and effective way?

In discussions with people in the forum, it became clear that these “knowledge integration” activities within R&D exhibit many of the same opportunities commonly observed in other complex, cross-functional business processes. These opportunities include improving hand-offs between functions/individuals, ensuring availability of the right information at the right time, questioning “legacy” systems , and working on the “right” things.

In short, the forum consensus was a resounding YES. There absolutely is value for Operational Excellence in R&D, so the real question is about how to capture it.

Any thoughts?

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Jason Dunklee is a Practice Manger at Maxiom Group, where he brings a combination of technical insight, project management and life sciences industry experience to his client work. A manufacturing engineer with operational excellence, engineering analysis and consulting experience, Mr. Dunklee has played important roles in helping companies identify and reduce waste in their supply chains and organizations. He earned his Master’s degree in Global Manufacturing Engineering from Boston University, with a specialty in lean manufacturing. He is a certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and is recognized by the Project Management Institute (PMI) as a Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM).