…was not the headline this week, but so easily could have been.
Since the start of the pandemic, the media have repeatedly reported on how it normally takes 10 years to develop a vaccine, and how, with coronavirus, experts were hoping to reduce this down to just one year. Now, as anyone who runs a business knows, if you can reduce the lead time to develop a new product by 90%, then you have an incredible USP and can probably steal the market in any sector in which you wish to operate. Yet, very little has been made of this incredible fact…until now.
Reading this article, really made me smile… To this day, I remember standing up in front of Albert Caspers (then Chairman of Ford of Europe) and his top team in 1996 in Koln, and taking him through a new NPD (New Product Development) concept that myself and several others had come up with for rapidly introducing vehicle changes, and new vehicles, in order to steal the market. From this meeting, the ‘carline team’ concept was born, as I understand it, is still in use today.
The guiding principle behind the concept was waste (although we hadn’t started talking about lean yet in those days). We had recognised that in a fast-changing market, we were getting behind in getting new products on the road, due to delays in development, approvals, testing, prototyping etc. and quite simply, new and exciting functionality and improvements were just not getting prioritised. Our concept, of creating a small autonomous team, that had the skills, experience, authority, trust of their peers etc., to focus on either small rapid changes, or complete new vehicles, totally changed the business and the speed to get new products into the marketplace.
The process used by those developing Covid vaccines all over the world has been similar.
Across all the vaccines (that I have read up on) the time taken to gain approval is probably the longest lead item, and the constraint process. Should a value stream map be completed on the development process, it would be apparent that there is a mass of waste, categorised as ‘waiting time’ – and as we each reflect on our own businesses, who doesn’t often see delays in a process where we are waiting for someone to even look at something that needs approval, let alone the potential NVA (Non Value Add) in that approval itself.
Another common thread, and certainly in the Astra/Oxford vaccine, was the ‘modularisation’ of the solution. Many of the vaccines were not developed from a clean sheet of paper, but built on something we already had. To a degree, the Oxford vaccine was one of the best examples of this, where they had actually planned for a new virus, an unknown enemy. Using a contingency planning type approach, a modular concept was applied that enabled them to develop a new vaccine rapidly from something that was tried, tested, and easy to adapt.
Having developed a product the scientists believed would work against Covid, they then utilised another lean tool. Instead of linear processing, and waiting for testing to be completed, they started manufacturing straight away. This is also when they implemented yet another element of lean – instead of waiting for the trials to finish and then passing results on to regulators, they engaged the regulators straight away, thus reducing the lead time to final approval.
Perhaps the most telling statement in this story comes from Dr Mark Toshner, referring to the 10 year long process to develop a vaccine, he said: “Most of the time, it’s a lot of nothing.”
And whilst expediting the route to market this way was not without risk (if the vaccine didn’t work, or didn’t get approval, think of all the waste in manufactured vaccine), it also shows how lean really can change the business world.
Whilst the opportunities for reducing time to market for any product in any sector may not be as great as in the pharmaceutical, and maybe a 90% reduction in total lead time is at the top end, in my experience across many sectors, my experience is that greater than 95% waste is common, and achieving 50% reduction in lead time is very realistic.
Therefore, if you haven’t solicited the support of a lean practitioner yet, and you want to steal the lead on your competition, perhaps today is the day you might think about changing that…