The Japanese Pharmaceutical

2000 Percent Solutions from the Real World (1) - The Japanese Pharmaceutical
By Samuel Okoro

ACSEA, the forty year old 2bn USD South East Asian subsidiary of a Japanese pharmaceutical group suffered a blow to its pride in 2003. A competitor which started operations just ten years back now surpassed it in the volume of Pharmaceutical-A produced, and its cost was now 13% lower than ACSEA's. The only hopes of responding effectively lay in the company's South East Asian Technical Centre whose role is to provide technical support to the factories and develop process technologies aimed at cost reduction for the organisation.

However morale at the centre was low, and its contributions to cost reductions for Pharmaceutical-A amounted to a measly 1% per annum. Hiroyuki Fukushima, a general manager with ACSEA, was sent to head the centre in July 2003. He immediately set about improving things to make the SEATC more effective. His boss believed he was doing very well and he tended to agree with this assessment...

Until he read the 2000 Percent Solution by Don Mitchell, Carol Coles and Robert Metz. In his words, he was shocked at the extent to which stalled thinking had limited his achievements and those of the SEATC. He quickly took up the challenge to remake the SEATC using the ideas from "the 2000 Percent Solution".

Realise the Importance of Measurements
Excited by the possibilities Fukushima realised that if SEATC could innovate 20 times more than they were doing already, they could make ACSEA the top company in the group. He set that as their new vision and introduced measurement systems to manage performance.