Interview with Chuck Aubrey, Vice President of Lean Six Sigma, Anderson Packaging
Chuck Aubrey, Vice President of Lean Six Sigma at Anderson Packaging recently joined the American Strategic Management Institute (ASMI) at our Lean Six Sigma Excellence Summit. There he delivered one of our keynote address Keynote Address: Working through a Lean Six Sigma Deployment for Maximum Results in Service and Transactional Environments. ASMI recently spoke with Chuck about his experiences with Lean Six Sigma.
Q: Tell us about your business and the competitive challenges you face?
A: As a pharmaceutical packager our customers (the top 40 drug companies in the world) are also our competitors. They outsource some of their work to us. Therefore we compete with their in-house production operations. They can always take the work in-house. Therefore we need to be better, lower cost, more reliable, more on time, better meet regulations, more efficient and provide better customer satisfaction. We also have a potential threat of the off shore outsourcing. While this may be more difficult as the FDA needs to approve these operations, there is a capital hurtle and a know-how hurtle it is some off shore packagers are emerging.
Q: Why did you decide to initiate your Lean Six Sigma program?
A: For the above reasons. In addition our customers are expecting cost reductions year after year and having been recently purchased by Fortune 500 AmerisourceBergen they expect healthy profit returns.
Q: What is the deployment strategy your company uses?
A: You may want to reference my presentation for more details. How ever our strategy was to train the steering committee in Lean and Six Sigma, then train Green Belts with selected projects that solve a problem, meet a strategic objective, will save money, and impact the customer. We expanded over the last two years to 130 Green Belts, 6 Black Belts and 50 projects a year with hard saving of $3-5million annually.
Q: What was/is your biggest personal challenge in implementing Lean Six Sigma and your deployment strategy in your business?
A: Convincing Sr. Mgt. that it works particularly in the pharmaceutical environment. The industry until 2003 or 4 did not want to "continuously improve". All processes including procedures, equipment, components as well as all aspects of the product itself must be approved in a very arduous and time consuming process by the Food and Drug Administration.
As a result no one wanted to change anything once it was approved. The FDA realized that this would not be a very competitive industry and environment it this continued. Therefore they began encouraging improvement but it has been hard for many companies to change this long standing culture.
Q: How did you ensure to win the support of the senior and middle management?
A: Much support comes when you complete some projects and Sr. Mgt. sees first hand the improvements. Our project have averaged $90K of hard savings and over $50K of soft savings like increased capacity and cost avoidance. Never the less when 50 plus teams are operating that takes a lot of people time and time is the most important ingredient and resource. I need to keep the results constantly in front of Sr. Mgt. such as project presentation, score cards, goal and strategy completions, customer and employee surveys that continue to show the benefits-that keeps them engaged and interested.
Q: In your opinion, when is the right time to launch a company-wide initiative such as Lean Six Sigma?
A: The best time is when the company is operating successfully. However they need it most when they are not. No matter how thing are they need a burning platform! Some major reason(s) why they should. In our case and others I have delt with they believed and pursued continuous improvement but never quite had a really good process or results. This is a proven successful strategy. Additionally many companies are being continuously asked of price concession. We too are asked by our customers. We were purchased by a Fortune 500 company, AmerisourceBergen, and they have performance goals and objectives (and shareholders) that need to met as well. In a global economy a company needs to continuously improve to be on top and competitive or else.
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