We operate in a challenging and changing environment – but it isn’t just difficult economic conditions that are putting the squeeze on.

In consumer healthcare, customers demand greater innovation and at the same time expect better value for money, which means the market is more competitive than ever. The upshot is: to be successful we need to deliver better products, faster and more efficiently than ever before.

In manufacturing, one of the big drains on efficiency is when you shut down all the machinery to change the production line to switch to another product. This is known as a changeover, and is not unlike a pit-stop in a grand prix race. The core machinery remains the same, but it undergoes a swift service and new items are added where appropriate.

Where the two processes differ hugely is the time they take to complete. In an F1 race, the McLaren team regularly post stationary pit-stop times of between two and three seconds. Traditionally, a changeover at one of our toothpaste manufacturing plants could take as long as 40 minutes.

On such margins are races - and potentially efficiencies - won and lost.

Cutting down this changeover time became a priority. The obvious next move was to enlist the help of our partner McLaren in running a pilot scheme in one of our plants. After embedding McLaren methodology  - which included introducing a healthy level of competition between teams and delegating authority to the most experienced operators on the production line – our staff identified changes that could cut the changeover time by 60%, saving 250 hours of production time a year.

This time saving resulted in an increase in manufacturing capacity to the tune of 6.7 million tubes of toothpaste every year. We’re now looking at ways that we can share this methodology to create a standard of performance right across our supply chains.