Challenge: Busy People vs. Finished Work

Lonza started with the assumption that everyone needed to be working on something at every possible moment. This mindset drove everything — and it was literally creating a traffic jam in their IT department.

One day, there was a shared realization that if Lonza optimized utilization, they would get BUSY people. On the other hand, if they optimized throughput, they would get finished projects. Effectively, more projects (or work in progress) meant “longer waiting time,” which in turn meant “longer project duration.”

Even though the theory of throughput constraints was well known, it wasn’t easy to change people’s mindset without something more visual. They needed a project management solution that focused on resolving and preventing bottlenecks to improve the flow of projects within the company.