Continuous improvement in R&D
R&D management in pharmaceuticals, and bio-tech companies, is under pressure to increase productivity. Anyone with budget and output targets is reviewing all possible routes to improvement and trying to create a broader flow of drug candidates that are more successful through development while controlling costs.
Continuous improvement is central to current attempts to improve R&D performance. However, applying TQM and Six Sigma principles to discovery research can hit a serious objection: how can you apply learning if each research opportunity looks unique? This requires some deep thinking about the use of information to support decisions, amid the intrinsic variety of research projects.
Major pharma companies have succeeded with improvement to logistics processes such as substance management, analysis, and synthesis, that are in common across different scientific applications. Beyond this, we see great potential, and have experience in continuous improvement of decision-making.
Opportunities for improved use of knowledge in strategic discovery decisions
Opportunities for sustained improvement exist at all levels from the strategic to the operational. For example:
- planning of end-to-end screening and compound profiling in discovery
- making better tradeoffs between cost, risk and time in project planning and task scheduling
- better use of existing knowledge in current experiments
- implementing work flow to improve speed and capture knowledge in research processes
Our experience
We help our clients deliver improvement from high level planning of the conduct of science to hands-on science. See how we can help you:
- Improve the design of predictions and experiments within compound screening and profiling. Test your quality of judgment on the choice of screening strategy with our screening strategy explorer demonstration.
- Improve project planning and risk management in the critical and evolving stage of: Lead to Proof of Concept
- Capture tacit knowledge for use in future synthesis (Read more pdf)
- design of clinical trials
- Accelerate workflow in the quest for new targets – a practical application to improvement of protein crystallography (Read more pdf)
