Ortho-Clinical's chief applies lean strategies
DemocratandChronicle.com
Nishad Majmudar
Staff writer
(December 13, 2005) — With 17 years of experience in large-scale manufacturing at Johnson & Johnson companies, Elaine Thibodeau is no stranger to the competitive pressures of a global economy.
As the new general manager of Rochester operations at Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics, a J&J medical device company that employs 1,500 people in the area, Thibodeau is using her expertise to implement lean manufacturing programs — cost-cutting measures prevalent in today's competitive marketplace.
"It's a business reality," said Thibodeau, 43. "For us to remain competitive, we have to be financially responsible and we have to deliver financial results. I'm responsible for manufacturing costs so I have to deliver against that."
As general manager, Thibodeau oversees manufacturing and on-time shipment from the company's Greece facility of Ortho-Clinical's products that include diagnostic machines used by clinicians for such tasks such as blood analysis.
She also considers how to reduce inefficiency and expand the company's product lines within the plant's finite space.
"Every time you bring a new analyzer into the market, there's a significant amount of floor space that's required to make that happen," said Thibodeau, a native of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. "What's the best way to manage space so we're not necessarily having to add to size to the building?"
Lean programs are defined as techniques that can create time and cost savings by eliminating or minimizing business processes that don't add value to the end product or service.
"If you look at the steps that get done to make something or service something, half of the steps don't add value that the consumer would want to pay for," said Gregory Dobson, associate professor of operations management at University of Rochester's William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration.
"A lot of the times those processes are there because of historical reasons: this was how things were done," Dobson said. "Lean is all about understanding processes and removing non-value-adding steps."
The lean concept was first adopted by the automobile industry three decades ago, Dobson said, but is gaining steam in other industries such as medical device manufacturing, which encompasses a wide variety of products. Bausch & Lomb Inc., for example, is also developing lean manufacturing methods. And Rochester Institute of Technology's Center for Lean Enterprise helps other companies put the method to work.
"The need for being lean, when you have a very high mix of products, is all about being very flexible so you can manage changeovers very quickly," Thibodeau said. "In equipment manufacturing, there are much larger pieces of equipment that have a lot more components going into them."
Thibodeau has used lean techniques successfully at previous J&J appointments.
For 15 years, Thibodeau worked at McNeil Consumer Products in Guelph, Ontario, a J&J unit that makes Tylenol and Motrin, ultimately managing manufacturing there.
Prior to taking the Ortho-Clinical job, Thibodeau worked for more than two years for J&J's DePuy division, a maker of orthopedic implants, in France's Champagne region.
"In France, we implemented lean manufacturing, which was about cell manufacturing, where for one particular product you put all the machines for that product in one area," she said. "We went from 35 days manufacturing down to 15 days over a two-year period."
Thibodeau said one approach to lean manufacturing that can apply to Ortho-Clinical is using hard data to identify and fix a problem.
"If our field engineers or technicians would be confronted by our customers on a recurring issue, they would get together with the equipment manufacturing personnel and look at the problem systematically," she said. "We'd look at the data we have and look at what the causes may be. You need data to ensure you're comparing apples to apples and looking at facts and not someone's gut feelings or instincts."
Ortho-Clinical is also adopting lean methods in manufacturing reagents, which are substances used in medical diagnostics.
"We took repair of motors that, in significant part, drive our equipment," said Rick Mihaljevic, Ortho-Clinical's plant manager of reagent manufacturing. "We used to outsource that repair, but by leveraging the experience and technical expertise of our maintenance group, we not only had costs savings but we have the skills within the maintenance group to get the repairs done internally."
Thibodeau said there is no concrete timeline for the lean programs, which she called an ongoing project.
"Anybody that's manufacturing any kind of equipment has to be as lean and efficient as possible," she said. "The lower the 'throughput' time, the happier our sales forces are because they're making deliveries more quickly."
