June 2020 Featured Report

An old engineering adage says that in any technical project, you can get speed and/or quality and/or cost-efficiency — but you never get to have all three. The idea is that emphasizing any one of those parameters necessarily deemphasizes one or both of the others. For most of the biopharmaceutical industry’s early years, companies operated on that assumption. Many organizations saw speed as the weakest link that could be more or less ignored; others had money to burn. The smartest companies always have considered quality simply to be the cost of doing business when customer lives are at stake. Only bad actors put money ahead of all else. The 21st century has changed that old rule of thumb. Modern technology and business strategies consider all three criteria equally. Time is money, after all, and quality failures compromise both. Making high-quality products is a “given” because nothing else will pass regulatory approval. But now managers ask how to achieve that level of success in the shortest possible t...