Process improvement at Amersham

This is a case study of an improvement of the order-to-delivery process at an engineering unit within Amersham, now a GE Healthcare company.

The client

Amersham, now a GE Healthcare company, is one of the most well-known and respected supplier of process equipment to the biotech and pharmaceutical industry. The engineering department has a long track record of supplying high quality products to demanding customers operating according to GxP standards.

The challenge

To map and improve the order-to-delivery process and support processes for the department, and to clarify roles and responsibilities within the organisation. The department designs and manufactures complex engineered bioprocess equipment, both standard and customer-specified items. While keeping an excellent product quality, the internal processes for specification, design, manufacturing and functional testing differed widely between product lines. This caused unnecessary lead times, delays and over-head costs. The department also had the need to communicate and display its quality system in an easy-to-grasp form, both to customers and employees.

The solution

CANEA Consulting group is a management consulting firm focusing on operations management through IT solutions. CANEA worked as project managers, in close cooperation with the client, with mapping and improving the internal processes. During the project, a number of improvements to the workflows were made, e.g.

• A new and comprehensive method for controlling the manufacturing to release process though operations plans and test plans was introduced.
• An improved system for receiving inspection of incoming components was implemented.
• Quality and project plans for customer-specified development projects were introduced to improve project management while keeping flexibility.
• The production planning was improved to help anticipate and prevent upcoming bottleneck problems at key suppliers.
• An IT workflow application for managing product and process improvement issues was designed, built and implemented.
• CANEA also developed, together with the client’s own IS/IT staff, an easy-to-use interface to the management system, using graphic navigation and person-specific interfaces on the company intranet.

The future

The new processes and the interface are now in use in the Swedish department. The company is currently preparing for introducing and adapting these processes to the two other engineering departments in Europe and the U.S.