Accelerate ROI – Reduce Time to Market!

Developing a new manufacturing facility or manufacturing line is a major investment for any company. Once the facility and equipment are in place then getting to full production as quickly as possible becomes the next major challenge.

A critical factor here is training. Both operations and maintenance personnel must be properly trained and capable of carrying out their roles competently and consistently while complying with health and safety and GMP regulations.

In today’s intensely competitive marketplace and cost-conscious environment, companies do not have the luxury of spending months training personnel in a newly-built facility before seeing an ROI or Return On Investment (revenue when the plant is running consistently at target production levels versus the cost of the new facility).

Furthermore, stakeholders want to see returns as soon as a facility is ready for business. Most companies do not do enough training prior to new plant startup which results in slow attainment of continuous full design production. Clearly the workforce must therefore be trained and ready to ‘hit the ground running’ so that time to market for the product is as short as possible.

Training prior to startup is not always done well because, in the past, it was difficult and costly to do. Such training is now much easier to do, and less costly, due to e-Learning technology which has now advanced in The Technology Adoption Life Cycle, passing from the “early adopters” to the “early majority” stage resulting in low risk for Users.

This concept of ‘Accelerating ROI’ is one that can be achieved through the application of e-Learning technologies or more specifically, e-Learning content that is developed with clear business objectives firmly in mind.

As a knowledge transfer company, part of CompuPharma’s services is the design and build of custom or ‘bespoke’ e-learning content for clients in regulated industries. We believe that e-Learning presents a number of outstanding advantages to regulated companies as they strive to improve productivity and meet critical business challenges.

These advantages include:

• Similar to On-the-Job Training but without need for mentor to be present
• Effective knowledge-transfer due to engaging format
• Localization into other languages – assist other plants in the company
• Ease of access anywhere, 24/7
• Easily assigned to appropriate personnel – LMS
• Designed for ease of updating to reflect experience
• Avoid “making the same mistakes over and over” – new plants
• Usable as a Reference as well as a Training Course
• Experts are not always available – e-Lessons are
• Access via LMS allows restrictions for protection of company asset

 

To understand the Accelerate ROI concept and how e-Learning can be applied to it, let’s look at a typical scenario for constructing a new manufacturing facility or line.

In such a scenario, the following points would apply:

1. The project team is focused on meeting the deadline
2. There is minimal interface between Project Team and Plant Operations/Maintenance (OPS/MAINT) personnel during the design and construction phases.
3. There is some interface between OPS/MAINT during the Commissioning and Startup phases.
4. There is a facility handover to Operations as soon as the process is confirmed – this marks the end of the Startup phase.
5. Plant personnel learn mostly by trial and error – especially for Implicit (experience-based) information.

The traditional method of training personnel in a new facility or start-up scenario would go something like the following:

• Production and maintenance personnel try to pick up as much knowledge as they can from the Project Team during the construction, commissioning and start-up phases.
• The Project Team is already busy with its own tasks and under pressure to meet completion deadlines. As a result, any training given tends to be ‘on the fly’, unstructured and likely to be incomplete.
• As a consequence, training records may be patchy and incomplete which will pose problems from a regulatory viewpoint
• When the facility is up and running initially and supposed to be delivering an immediate ROI (what the investors expect), production and maintenance personnel are still learning on-the-job and there is no simple method of accumulating implicit (experience-based) information thus, the same mistakes are made again and again resulting in an inefficient and sub-optimal manufacturing process as they attempt to get up to speed.

This traditional approach can, and frequently does, result in longer ‘time to market’ as shown in the following graph:

Now let’s look at a different scenario – one that involves using e-Learning technology to train personnel, efficiently, comprehensively and ‘just in time’ so that they are productive from day one of a new facility’s operation. In other words, Accelerating ROI.

Accelerate ROI aims to substantially reduce the duration of Fine-tuning of the Process by comprehensively training Operations and Maintenance personnel in advance of Start-Up.

The ethos of Accelerate ROI is that early addressing of employee competency training using e-Learning technology will result in rapid start-up and fine tuning of manufacturing processes.

So How Is This Achieved?

Data gathered from the Design, Installation, Commissioning, Start-Up and Fine-Tune phases is used to prepare and run a continuous Training Program for Operations and Maintenance personnel, who were hired early in the Construction Project.

This ensures that the time from the “hand-over” (end of Commissioning)  to the achievement of continuous Target Production is much shorter than the norm  - and this means rapid Return on Investment (ROI) or Reduced Time to Market.

Here’s how we, at CompuPharma, approach a typical Accelerate ROI project:

1. We devise a plan for the Accelerate ROI Project

2. We develop training materials during Construction Project from Design phase. Training materials can consist of e-Learning modules (‘e-Lessons’), drawings, and manuals. These will become the basis of all future training and will be accessed by Engineering and others for similar future projects.
   
   For example, we might build a suite of interactive, media-rich ‘e-Lessons’ to train operations and maintenance personnel on a new filling line process. Thus we would have separate e-Lessons covering vial washing, sterilization, filling, capping, and tray loading. Each e-Lesson would cover the purpose, components, operation, and regular maintenance tasks for each equipment item in the line and would be available anytime, anywhere to those requiring training in these areas.

3. Operations & Maintenance personnel are trained using these materials during the Construction phase of the project.

4. Training Materials are continuously updated during the Construction Project and Fine-Tune period.

The positioning of the Accelerate ROI project within the context of the overall project is shown below:

So instead of a less than optimal time to market, we now have the following scenario, i.e. the time to market is reduced:

Exceed Target Production Project

Once a facility is up and running, e-Learning technology can also be applied to the business objective of exceeding target production.

Exceeding the designed Target Production is possible in new plants if the effort to do so is structured as a
specific Project.

Most plants do eventually exceed Target Production but, with a dedicated project, it can be done much faster.

The Training Program and materials developed for an Accelerate ROI project can be used by Operations, Maintenance and Engineering personnel in future to improve their performance (Company Asset to be protected)

The concept is illustrated below:

Summary

Attempts to accelerate ROI are not new but our approach provides a novel way of using e-learning technology to train personnel in new facility/line situations in a way that will accelerate ROI and realize long-term productivity gains such as:

1. Faster Time to Market – early ROI – more revenue
2. Exceed Target Production – more revenue
3. Data for improving plant performance – company asset
4. Data to improve future similar projects
5. Proven employee Training Material for life of the plant
   
   

For more information on our Accelerate ROI and Continuous Process Improvement Programs contact: Barry Boyle