Early Planning For Success - Johnson & Johnson

By Siemens Industry, Inc.

Kris Buys, engineering and design director for Johnson & Johnson Europe, discusses how early contractor involvement (ECI) in automation saves considerable time and money.

Q: One aspect of your responsibilities is a so-called early supplier involvement initiative. How important is this within the Johnson & Johnson organization?

A: Kris Buys: When we look at project execution, a number of critical areas have a big impact on the project KPIs (key performance indicators), such as cost, quality, and schedule. If you don’t have information or expertise early, there is a good possibility that parts of the design will have to be reworked at a later stage. Redoing the design will impact cost, schedule, and possibly quality. So by taking an approach that involves our suppliers very early in the project, we want to resolve all these issues.

Let’s take the field of automation, which we identified as one of the key areas where we can benefit from the expertise of our suppliers. In the past we often engaged automation companies after we had generated the vast majority of the construction documents and when we were finishing the detailed design. That is too late: The lack of automation expertise in the front end design will trigger design changes when the automation  company gets involved. What was designed is not correct, or needs to be optimized. That’s why we need earlier involvement, so we can extract the knowledge, expertise, and experience from the automation
company to avoid problems later.