Greenhouse Spotlight

In the world of pharmaceutical manufacturing, precision and efficiency are paramount. Every moment counts, especially during a packing changeover: the critical process of switching a line from one product to another. It’s a complex dance of cleaning, clearing, and setting up, where variability can lead to delays and impact supply. At AstraZeneca, one team decided to not just improve this process, but to fundamentally transform it.

This year, Tulip is proud to present the 2025 Greenhouse Award to AstraZeneca’s Digital Changeovers (DCO) Team. This award recognizes a team that leverages Tulip to drive continuous transformation through collaborative problem-solving and user-centric design. The DCO team embodies this spirit, pioneering a new approach that blends cross-functional expertise and an agile mindset to define a new standard for operational excellence.

The success of the DCO team began with its unique structure. “We are an innovative team from AstraZeneca representing pharmaceutical packing operations, embodying a collaboration between our Manufacturing, Lean Digital, and IT functions,” explains Tom Foulkes, Associate Director, Digital Projects. This wasn't just a project group; it was a purpose-built coalition of diverse perspectives.

From the outset, the team established a culture of true inclusivity, bringing together representatives from every key function. With members from these different functions at the table to solve a complex, multi-faceted problem, they ensured that they would hear from every corner of the business. This collaborative spirit was fueled by a shared goal that acted as their "north star."

“Very early on, we had an idea of what digital changeovers could become,” Foulkes shares. “With some early experimentation and a proof of concept, it helped to really show us a vision of the future and the impact it would have on our various teams. That instantly became a central, protected, shared goal that everyone became really passionate about.”

This vision was powerful because every group could see a win. “For Quality, it meant greater data transparency and visible audit trails. For Manufacturing, it promised deeper process ownership and insight. For Lean Digital, it was an opportunity to digitize a core process and structure data for problem solving and tangible, continuous improvements.”

A shared vision is only as strong as the trust that underpins it. The DCO team faced a common challenge: a mix of confident and outspoken voices, equally experienced but more reserved individuals, and newer members of the team with a different point of view. To ensure every perspective was valued from the start, they employed a simple but powerful technique.

“Rather than just openly discussing the project charter, we went old school with it,” Foulkes recalls. “We printed out the charter for each individual and we sat in silence in the meeting room for about 20 minutes… going round the table we got everyone to in turn share their notes with the group.”

This deliberate, methodical approach ensured a well-rounded and deeply considered project scope from day zero. It also set the stage for a culture of psychological safety, which the team nurtured with clear principles. Every debate was anchored to their shared end-user focus, allowing for healthy, productive conversations.

With the team aligned, DCO turned their attention to the core mission: improving changeover performance. Changeovers are a major source of lost productive time in packing operations; the existing paper-based process was complex, highly variable, and lacked real-time visibility, directly impacting operational efficiency.

The team’s approach was unconventional. While reducing the absolute time of a changeover was a goal, they prioritized something more fundamental. “We quite early on decided that the variability was more important to us as a team, with our Lean hat on,” Foulkes explains. “We wanted to be process-driven rather than results-driven. So targeting process variability rather than the absolute time the process takes felt like the right thing to do.”

To build their solution, the team knew they had to work closely with the people who knew the process best: the frontline operators. “The cycle of ‘listen, build, and test’ became really central to our culture and kept us true to end-user needs throughout,” Foulkes notes. This continuous feedback loop wasn't a one-time survey; it was an ongoing dialogue.

The DCO solution was built on the Tulip platform, selected for its ability to deliver scalable, GXP-compliant, and user-friendly digital workflows. The system enables the digital creation and execution of standard work, real-time operator data capture, and analytics dashboards. This end-user-centric approach had a profound effect.

“Seeing people who were initially very resistant to the idea of change and digitization… turn into people that would then advocate for the solution to other teams looking to adopt the tool was a really special moment,” Foulkes shares.

The impact of DCO has been substantial, delivering unprecedented visibility into changeover activities at the task level. This enhanced granularity enabled the team to pinpoint and address tasks with the greatest variability through targeted process confirmations, driving improved standardisation.

As a result, the organization has seen significant benefits, especially with strong collaboration and engagement from production teams. One one production line, the team achieved a 29% reduction in average changeover time and a 50% reduction in variability. Beyond the numbers, DCO is driving a cultural and organizational shift. Operator feedback cited significant improvements in teamwork, visibility, and confidence in the now-standardized processes.

The digital tool has also enabled a new level of process agility. “We'd seen the standard work instructions go through 10 updates in the space of four months,” Foulkes says. “This is a standard that probably wouldn't be updated any more than once a year traditionally.”

Ultimately, these improvements translated directly into greater production capacity, allowing AstraZeneca to supply more medicines to more patients worldwide, without compromising compliance or quality.

The DCO project scaled with incredible speed, expanding from a single pilot line to 17 sites and over 100 packing lines globally within just three months. This rapid adoption demonstrated strong digital leadership endorsement and a readiness to evolve core processes. The team's next steps involve further embedding the tool and scaling the solution to other business units in 2026.

This journey has also highlighted a critical lesson for sustainable innovation. “It highlighted the need for someone to own that product and to continue to drive the tools forward in the future so that they don't become stagnant,” Foulkes reflects. The team is also exploring the use of AI and large language models to analyze operator commentary, turning free-text feedback into structured, actionable insights.

The AstraZeneca DCO team’s story is a powerful blueprint for success. It demonstrates that with a shared vision, a foundation of trust, and a relentless focus on the people closest to the process, citizen development can unlock not just process efficiencies, but a culture of in-house innovation and ownership. They haven’t just built an app; they’ve built a new way of working.