Preparation of a Class A certification in the field of pharmaceutical packaging through mapping and optimization of business processes and implementation of the Oliver Wight Class A Behaviors for Business Excellence.

Sammanfattning: On the road to success, companies need to fulfil their stakeholders’ expectations. On the road to business excellence, companies need to exceed these expectations. Oliver Wight Inc. has established a certification called Class A Business, which shows that a company is exceeding stakeholders’ expectations and that it performs in the upper quartile in its respective industry. The Class A Business certification is awarded, once a company fulfils a certification checklist with Class A Business criteria. To get to this point, a company can design their road to business excellence by following a specific set of nine Class A Behaviors. This study focuses on four of these behaviors, divided in three parts, and how they are implemented at a pharmaceutical packaging department at Roche in Kaiseraugst, Switzerland. In addition, through employee feedback potential areas of improvement are identified. For a company to understand how it is running, it has to understand its underlying processes. Once the processes are in place, a process-oriented way of thinking can change a company to make decisions based on process’ needs rather than on individual preferences. Business processes and their potential for continuous improvement were the first part of the study. The second part of the study investigated the communication of different functions in the packaging process and how the flow of information could be improved. In the third part, the usage of operational metrics in the packaging department is researched by a user feedback survey. An innovative way to visualize meeting conversations was developed in this study to make meetings more tangible for the reader. This is a newly developed and never before described method for business research colorfully showing interactions in meetings. The results are very intriguing. Simple thought business elements seem to pose larger hurdles than would be expected sometimes.