Sumitomo Pharma America, Inc.’s Post

As part of our culture of #ContinuousImprovement, SMPA employees are empowered to identify areas where we can reduce time and costs by implementing business excellence initiatives. Tim Belanger, Rauly Gutierrez, CPA, and our Finance team helped decrease SMPA’s financial closing time by 20 percent, a significant accomplishment. Leveraging LEAN principles, the team evaluated all of the processes required to close the books, simplifying individual tasks that were causing bottlenecks while moving others outside the normal process if they could be done earlier or in parallel. Thanks to Tim, Rauly and the team’s efforts, SMPA’s financial closing process is more streamlined and provides team members the ability to focus on more value-added work.