A shift at Pfizer

There is an early access article at Drug Discovery Today (via ScienceDirect) titled "New working paradigms in research laboratories" by two researchers at Pfizer.
There have been all kinds of news and rumors about reorgs at Pfizer going around for quite some time now (check for example here and other posts at pipeline.corante.com).
Maybe this article might offer some clue.

So, according to this article, what is Pfizer up to?

First, the article is only about the in-vitro screening part of the business, and without stating so, I think we are really talking high-throuput screening (HTS) here.

And the new paradigm: working shifts.

One of the perpetual problems of large pharmaceutical companies is to find a balance between doing basic research, where a certain amount of chaos, err, I mean creativity is needed, and running a well-oiled industrial process where you put money in at one end, and pills that earn you even more money pop out at the other end. In a regular, predictable manner.

HTS is probably more on the industrial end of the spectrum of the various activities that are going on in a pharmaceutical company. So looking at this from a resource management and allocation point of view makes some sense. Working in shifts probably really does allow to run more screens and utilize all those expensive robots better.

But, reading through the article, there are quite a few changes that were made to enable the shift work (which is two shifts, from 6am to 2pm and 1pm to 9pm, alternating every week):
- unhindered access to equipment
- ability to focus without the distraction of meetings
- hand picking the staff
- new processes which were trialled in the team

One can only wonder how much of the increase in productivity really came from working in shifts and how much came from these other four points.

Item number 2 is a winner in my book.