The LCS Impact Awards

Establishing Global CI Impact & Sustainability

Background

LGC is a leading, global life science tools company, providing mission-critical components and solutions into high-growth application areas across the human healthcare and applied market segments. 

• LCS Impact Award category: Team
• Team name: the LGC Lean Academy
• Award title: Establishment of an Impactful and Sustainable Global CI Organisation and Infrastructure

Activity

Based in the UK and led by Simon Leonard, the LGC team of David Kilroy, Samantha James & Roland Gilliam, established the newly formed ‘LGC Lean Academy’ as a centre of excellence to support the roll-out of sustainable Cl activity across the global LGC footprint.  

Under normal circumstances this alone might be considered unremarkable, however the Academy was created during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic with all travel restricted, teams working from home wherever possible, supply chain challenges and a backdrop of unprecedented increases in customer demand for COVID-19 related diagnostic products.

During this period the LGC Leadership and their teams were primarily focused on responding to huge increases in customer demand with long term CI seen as a strategically lower priority.   It’s not surprising therefore, that this business backdrop provided a huge challenge for the Lean Academy team to engage the organisation with a strategic and sustainable CI approach.

Impact

Despite the prevailing business headwinds, the first challenge for the team was to move from a face to face to an online delivery model delivered for the

Despite the prevailing business headwinds, the first challenge for the team was to move from a face to face to a global online delivery model delivered from the UK. 

All of the training materials needed to be re-imagined and this was successfully completed with complimentary investment in a purpose built training facility utilising the latest digital and learner management technologies.  The global time zones (up to + 9 hours) meant that the delivery model and the working practices needed to be adapted.

The range of remotely delivered support services developed covered both short and long term impact including: a point of impact service, initial awareness training, Leadership training, a practical managing for daily improvement process, an applied green belt programme and a lean reward and recognition system.

Quality assurance was ensured in associated with becoming an LCS certification centre and Pearson Assured training Centre.

The organisation and infrastructure has so far delivered 149 people trained in Cl methods across all production, commercial and support functions in each geography (EU, US & APAC), across ten Production Sites and seven non-production function, growing organisational Cl capability.  In addition, 60 Green belts have generated £495K of bottom line benefit with a further £420K in progress. 

There are many benefits from remote delivery in terms of saving time and cost.  Some aspects of developing a CI culture are still best done face to face and as most of the world begins to open up again, the LGC Lean Academy will move to a hybrid approach – building on the existing delivery model to take it to the next level of performance.