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/ artotalent This week on Making It In Manufacturing, Thomas McMann sat down with Thomas Emerik Rasmussen, a project and operations leader specialising in lean manufacturing and operational excellence, with over 15 years at Novo Nordisk spanning nine different roles across Denmark, Italy and the United States, building and leading large CapEx expansion projects before moving into consulting to help companies transform their quality operations.
In this episode, Thomas covers:
If you work in pharmaceutical manufacturing, operational excellence or facility design, this conversation offers a grounded look at how one of the industry's most successful scale-up stories was actually built, and where it goes from here. Worth your time from start to finish.
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Thomas Emerik Rasmussen
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Thomas McMann
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
01:21 Welcome to the podcast
01:34 Getting into engineering and lean manufacturing
03:31 Family, mentors and the draw to life sciences
04:50 Starting out as a management consultant
06:05 Advising medtech companies as a fresh graduate
07:08 Joining Novo Nordisk and an early promotion
09:10 Staying engaged across nine different roles
11:13 The proudest project: API expansion in Clayton, North Carolina
12:27 Relocating the family to the United States
13:17 The secret behind Novo Nordisk's growth
15:42 Scaling the business and optimising existing lines
16:04 Underestimating volumes and quadrupling API capacity
17:20 Separating operations from the CapEx organisation
19:51 The 2.9 billion QC facility and why it was unique
22:37 Innovation, automation and material handling
24:32 Project status and timeline to completion
25:21 The design one, build many model explained
27:10 The major benefits of modular design
29:13 Why more companies are adopting modular thinking
31:02 Keeping innovation alive within a standardised approach
32:37 How lean and operational excellence enable rapid expansion
34:03 Methodologies: value stream mapping
35:11 A wind turbine case study and a 25% lead time reduction
37:17 The lean mindset built into the API expansion
39:47 The biggest opportunities for innovation in facility design
41:18 Digital twins, AI and the future of facility flow
43:57 The risks around AI in design and regulation
44:57 Takeaways from the ISPE conference in the UK
45:27 Key lessons from scaling operations
48:36 The one thing he would have done differently
51:14 Closing thoughts
#MakingItInManufacturing #ARTOTalent #Pharma #PharmaceuticalManufacturing #LifeSciences #OperationalExcellence #LeanManufacturing #QualityControl #FacilityDesign #NovoNordisk #CapEx #ModularDesign
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