Moneyball for Manufacturing

I'm quite behind the times when it comes to watching movies. The last movie I saw was The Dark Knight Rises...

at a matinee...

so I don't get shot.

A few nights ago, I finally sat down and watched Moneyball, the movie with Brad Pitt and six Oscar nods. It is a "based on a true story" of how the perennially under-budgeted Oakland A's baseball club builds a near-championship team only to lose not only playoff games, but also their best players to big-money baseball clubs when the players' contract expire.

The Oakland A's general manager, Billy Beane, realizes his underfunded system will continue to produce good-enough results that will never win the championship. And to continue running his system the same way is insanity:

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein

To win, Beane decides to do something different, and that something different is focusing on the key performance indicators (KPIs) of winning and getting players that contribute positively to those KPIs... applying statistics and math to baseball is what they call, "Moneyball."

How many of us are in the same boat as this Oakland A's GM?

• How many of us are getting by with under-funded budgets?
• How many of us are managing our systems the same way they've been managed for years?
• How many of us can improve our systems by applying data-driven statistics?

Moneyball is to baseball what Manufacturing Sciences is to manufacturing:

• Having the data
• Understanding the system (which factors impact your KPIs)
• Applying the understanding to increase productivity or system capability.

Biotech and pharma manufacturing is in a period of static or diminishing budgets. Do more with the same or make do with less is the general mantra as the dollars go towards R&D or to acquisitions. To make matters worse, biosimilars are coming on-line to drive revenues even farther down.

by Oliver Yu

Questions I'm getting these days are:

What systems do I need to collect the right data?

What KPIs should I be monitoring?

What routine and non-routine analysis capabilities should I have?

Let's Play

p.s. - Watch the movie if you haven't seen it.  It's as good a movie as it is a good business case study.