Sunday 18 May 2014

How McLaren is applying F1 know-how to toothpaste and medicine 


A great article about how pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) had the courage to look outside of their industry, to find out methods to improve the efficiency of their business.  To most people it never would have crossed their minds that a Mclaren, a Formula One Team had knowledge and expertise that could benefit a pharmaceutical company. 

McLaren’s know-how from their fast and reputable pit lane changes helped GlaxoSmithKline in improving their efficiency by orders of magnitude.  McLaren’s “pit change” expertise was to improve the swapping over production lines for the different toothpastes GlaxoSmithKline produce.  This collaboration resulted in GlaxoSmithKline producing an extra 6.7 million tubes of toothpaste creating more than £100m in value in just one year. 

Great demonstration of what completely different industries can learn from each other.  If only the rest of British industry could be less narrow minded about what thinks I could learn from other industries.  Unfortunately most are too arrogant and run by those who can’t see that idea’s from outside their immediate peers could have having any relevance or benefit to them.