If there’s such a thing as a best place to be stuck in an elevator, it’s at Ben Venue Laboratories in Bedford.
Norman Floom, senior electrician, recently introduced an idea to label each of the main facility’s 13 elevators so that when an elevator goes down or someone is stuck inside, he knows exactly which elevator to check out first.
“When I arrived, it was a little confusing to figure out what elevator was which,” Floom says. “Now they’re labeled inside and out, so when someone says, ‘I am on X elevator,’ we know exactly where X elevator is. It reduces the time to start repair.”
The elevator improvement idea is just one of 40 ideas Floom has contributed to an organized system called Idea Catcher within Ben Venue Laboratories, a manufacturer of sterile injectable products for the pharmaceutical industry. Idea Catcher gathers the ideas of Ben Venue employees to improve systems in the workplace. They are reviewed by upper management, who institute the best ones, says Shawn Laughlin, one of the company’s process excellence specialists, who heads up the Idea Catcher program.
“Conceptually, we want a grass-roots system to harvest ideas from the frontline workers,” Laughlin says.
Employees can contribute ideas at stations throughout the facility or electronically — anything from a tip about how to improve the efficiency of manufacturing, to a suggestion to stock the vending machines with Red Bull to improve worker efficiency, to a plan to institute child care at the facility. If employees’ ideas are put into place, they are recognized on the company intranet, in the newsletter and on an internal TV broadcast.
“I like ideas,” says Floom, who has gotten on board with the program. Of his 40 ideas, three have been approved and are in progress, 25 are being evaluated, and the others have been closed.
But Idea Catcher is just the beginning of a huge companywide rollout of an improvement process that spans every area of the business.
In 2009, Ben Venue Laboratories created a new project management office with a focus on pursuing continuous improvement within the company. Scott Lanzilotta (pictured at left) was brought on from an aerospace company to lead the business process excellence efforts.
“Coming from another industry, he could see problems from another perspective,” says Scott Wells, executive director of supply chain management and the project management office. “We brought him in for a fresh look. People had grown too close to their jobs to see the issues.”
Soon, other full-time employees joined Lanzilotta. Called the Process Excellence Team, they narrowed down and rolled out nine strategic initiatives in 2010 to increase safety, production and profits and decrease inventory and lead times.
One of those projects was the Idea Catcher, which draws more than an idea a day from employees and has increased employee engagement dramatically, says Lanzilotta.
Another project aimed to get products to customers faster. In January 2010, it took 67 days from the time a product was sealed to the time it was released from Ben Venue to the customer.
“Essentially, we had a lot of product pending release,” Lanzilotta says. “We were waiting on the batch record and other documentation to support its release.”
By holding a series of employee workshops for those who contribute to the batch dispositioning processes, the number of days to customer had been reduced to 36 in February 2011.
“The pharmaceutical industry is very siloed,” Lanzilotta says. A lot of the problem came from poor communication among staff. Once they knew what they were responsible for and could pick up the slack where it was needed, the system began functioning more efficiently, he says.
In 2011, all 1,400 Ben Venue employees will be expected to participate in continuous improvement efforts through training, working on a team project, or contributing an idea to the Idea Catcher.
“We are always moving on to the next idea, the next tool, the next technique,” Wells says. “And everyone has been able to share in the improvement.”