process improvement

2nd Business Process Excellence for Pharmaceuticals, Biotech and Medical Devices (1 of 2)

Business Process Excellence for Pharmaceuticals, Biotech and Medical Devices, The Brewery, London, April 2011 (1 of 2) John Riddell and Elisabeth Goodman, RiverRhee Consulting1 This was the second of IQPC’s specialist conferences on this theme, and as last time2, many of those questioned by the authors were finding it of real value for learning about …

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Operational Excellence and Knowledge Management in an R&D Laboratory Environment

Reflections from IQPC’s 6th Annual Smartlab Exchange, Berlin, February 2011 ELNs, LIMS, and LESs IQPC kindly invited me to speak on Operational Excellence and Knowledge Management at this year’s Smartlab Exchange conference in Berlin.  Although I have been responsible for Biological Data Management and Laboratory Notebooks in an R&D environment during the course of my …

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Intuition revisited – implications for process improvement and Lean Six Sigma (Part 2 of 3 blogs)

Intuition has an important role in process improvement In a previous blog “The problem with relying on intuition for process improvement and decision making” I emphasized the problems with, rather than the opportunities for intuition. However, as Gary Klein(1) points out, the analytical techniques practiced in Lean Six Sigma also have their shortcomings.  A point also …

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Intuition revisited: how it could be important to a business environment (Part 1 of 3 blogs)

Intuition does have an important role in business In a previous blog “The problem with relying on intuition for process improvement and decision making” I emphasized the problems with, rather than the opportunities for intuition. One of my blog readers, Deborah Peluso, kindly pointed me to Gary Klein’s 30+ years of work on intuition with the …

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Using consultants with purpose

Jokes about consultants abound, and, like all good jokes, the experience that provoked them is not hard to discern.  An excellent one-liner, quoted by Parcell and Collison in their book ‘No more consultants’1 is: “Consultants ask to borrow your watch to tell you the time, and then walk off with your watch!”2 As you would …

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Crowd-sourcing and tagging: an application of knowledge management to continuous process improvement and innovation

Guest blog by Matthew Loxton1 This discussion is about Process Improvement from a Knowledge Management perspective, but rather than covering the topic from the stratosphere, I have chosen to dig into a very specific and somewhat narrow slice – the use of internal crowdsourcing and tagging as a conduit to producing (and encouraging) process and …

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Employee engagement – some interesting data and perspectives for Lean and Six Sigma practitioners

Employee involvement is of course fundamental to the success of any business process improvement initiative: without the close involvement of those who are involved in an organisation’s process, it would be futile to try to identify opportunities for improvement, let alone to try to implement them.  So it was with some interest that I read …

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Business Process Excellence in Pharma, Biotech and Medical Devices – April 2010 – Key Themes

An integrated approach to Strategy, People, Process, Content and Technology is central to the success of business process improvement. Elisabeth Goodman, Owner and Principal Consultant, RiverRhee Consulting, opened the conference with the importance of these themes in achieving Business Process Excellence (BPE).  She also came back to them in a later presentation (http://slidesha.re/aVhZso) describing the role …

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Knowledge management and creativity / innovation – valuable adjuncts to project management. A case study

Knowledge management and creativity/ innovation enhance project management. I am a firm believer in the value of knowledge management to enhance project management.  I also believe that the use of formal structures, such as those advocated in Lean and Six Sigma (or process improvement), and project management, give people more rather than less scope for …

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Achieving more value with less

As Stephen R. Covey, Bob Whitman and Breck England point out, in their one-hundred-and-ten page “Predictable results in unpredictable times”1: “in bad times, the distractions are more severe than ever… As people get laid off, the survivors have more to do.  The distractions pile up to the sky as the economy grows rougher…” In our …

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