What is it that I do?

Have you ever tried to explain to somebody what it is that you do, who is unfamiliar or not that interested in what you do. I have that problem with my wife and family all the time. When I try the interest-loss is immediate – somewhere after the middle of the 3rd sentence. When I ask my kids what they think that I do – they say that I sit in front of the computer all day and talk on the phone, which in a way is quite precise. Typically a specific keyword from my description sticks and so when asked what I do, it comes back as; ‘I think he is fixing software’, or ‘oh yes he is training’.

Although this may seem trivial the exercise in explaining what it is that you do is very valuable. When marketing in the new media it is important to tell the story in simple language – I call it the ‘children’s’ explanation. A simple plain English description of what it is that I do, without using any technical or industry jargon and without complicated adjectives. The less ‘gobbledygook’ the easier it is for people to understand and by the way it also helps to keep their attention. As in the Hebrew adage – “If you explain it slowly, I will understand quickly”.

Try it you will be surprised how hard it is and how much value it brings.

Here is mine:

I help people and companies in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry that produce medicine, drugs and tools for doctors with their computer systems. The use computers to make sure that their products have no defects, as wells as to make sure that they produce their products exactly the way the recipes instruct. The computer systems save and maintain all the information during the production so that it can be used to analyze what happened if there is a defect, or how to improve the production process. The computers also help automate some of the steps in the process.

EMI or BI - what are those anyways?

Lately I have had inquiries from a couple of customers about providing “intelligence”, as in manufacturing intelligence, well I believe that is a good topic I said… (Hint, see my blog’s title).

In most cases their curiosity came from either seeing or working with an EMI or Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence system. However when I asked about how they would like to use the intelligence I found out that they where asking about BI – Business Intelligence behavior, yet they wanted manufacturing metrics like the EMI system’s demo. That is an interesting discussion that I have mentioned a few times in this blog. I believe that what they really want are timely and sometimes real-time intelligence about their manufacturing operations provided in KPI lists, metrics and charts but also analytics capabilities such as “slicing and dicing” and “drill downs”.

Unfortunately I have found that such solutions are rare if they exist at all. It seems that EMI is a separate animal than BI and the problems that they are trying to address are more complicated than they generally convey in their sales and marketing information. Most EMIs do not provide an effective way to aggregate and correlate information to support BI style analytics, while the BI vendors’ understanding of 'real-time' and timeliness leave much to be desired for application in the manufacturing operations world.

I am back, sorry for the delay...

It has been a while since I posted something here, and I have a long list of bad excuses. (Here is the last one).

It has been a very exciting and busy time for me and my family. We have relocated from Indiana to the San Francisco Bay Area with all the excitement and hard work that follows. I guess that we are getting settled now so I am going to try and pick-up the blogging just a bit. I have quite a few interesting things to share so I hope find some time over the next month to do some more blogging.

I have been involved in some very interesting projects. I am working with BioMarin helping them figure out what MES will work best for them and some of the strategies around implementation. I have also had a short stint with Amgen looking at their Manufacturing Business Intelligence initiative. Apart from that I have been involved with a few of the Bay Area Biotech companies while at the same time trying to find new customers in North America.

On the event front I am planning to be at CBI's annual MES event (San Diego, in Sep.), AdvaMed (Washington DC, in Oct.), and the ISPE annual meeting (Orlando, Nov.) where we are organizing an educational session on Operational Excellence. So if you are going to be at any of these events let me know so we can catch-up. It’s going to be an interesting and busy period.

My Presentation at the MESA 2010 Annual Conference

In June I will be presenting at the MESA 2010 North American conference. The conference is going to be held in Dearborn, MI (near Detriot) hosted by Ford at their conference facility. I wanted to share the abstract here on my blog. I will be co-presenting with Kasper Larsen from Novo Nordisk and my colleague from NNE Pharmaplan, Asger Sharp-Johansen

The presentation shares our experiences from the current global MES rollout project at Novo Nordisk. This is an ongoing long term multi faceted project that involves a staggered deployment of a commercial MES software package to all of Novo Nordisk’s manufacturing sites.

Deploying a new manufacturing system is a complex and risky proposition for any company, rolling out such a system to multiple sites on a global scale may be even considered scary. In order to mitigate the risks and manage the complexity of this immense undertaking Novo Nordisk makes the best use of people and technology to evolve a best practice approach that is continually improved upon. This approach includes technical and organizational aspects that cover the complete life cycle of the manufacturing system’s deployment. In addition the “out-of-the-box” feature set of the software obviously did not suffice and navigating this predicament, coined as "Customize or Compromise", is another interesting topic.

Novo Nordisk is a global healthcare company with 87 years of innovation and leadership in diabetes care, haemophilia care, growth hormone therapy, and hormone replacement therapy. It has international production facilities and employs more than 29,300 employees in 76 countries.