Newsletter #7. The Hidden problems costing your factory stability and capacity

Curated by Fabrice Gribon, Founder of Gribon & Company
Practical, field-tested insights on operational excellence and business transformation — for Site Heads and Operations Directors.

Reflecting on our work the last 3 years, I've often seen organisations struggle with operational issues that are well-understood by individual teams but remain invisible to the collective leadership. A critical gap exists in connecting localized insights to a comprehensive, end-to-end operations visibility framework, leading to persistent "firefighting" rather than strategic resolution. Addressing this gap drives manufacturing stability and unlocks significant hidden factory capacity, ensuring reliable supply to patients and improving financial performance sustainably.

The context

Operations leaders in biopharma manufacturing navigate an environment characterized by immense pressure to maintain manufacturing stability while accelerating throughput and managing complex regulatory demands. The current landscape often forces site heads and COOs into a reactive posture, where daily operational issues consume resources and attention. Despite internal efforts to establish governance models, improvement programs often stall because they address symptoms without a clear, collective understanding of the underlying systemic risks. This dynamic creates a cycle where problems, seemingly managed, relentlessly resurface, undermining sustained operational performance.

Where performance is lost

The fundamental misstep most organisations make is believing that localised problem-solving inherently contributes to collective risk mitigation. What's consistently absent is a mechanism to elevate individual team insights into a holistic, enterprise-wide risk profile. Pharmaceutical and biopharma supply chains are inherently complex and often fragmented, operating in silos with disparate systems for procurement, quality, manufacturing, and logistics. This fragmentation prevents end-to-end operations visibility, making it difficult to identify and address systemic risks that are locally understood but collectively invisible.

Organisations often rely on manual records and siloed data repositories. This lack of real-time, comprehensive operational visibility forces teams into a perpetual "firefighting mode," where they react to recurring issues rather than proactively addressing their root causes, masking significant hidden factory capacity. While governance structures are in place, many are designed for slower operational cycles and struggle to integrate rapidly evolving digital insights or localised risk intelligence. Responsibilities spread across multiple groups without unified visibility lead to delays and an inability to collectively address risks that individual teams may recognise. The core mistake is failing to recognize that a governance model, however robust on paper, is ineffective without the collective visibility to inform it.