What is next for Global Operations?

Victor: We are launching GO2030 to build on the success of GO2025 by cementing our reputation through excellent safety and quality, as well as differentiation and scale in integration and efficiencies. This will continue to set us apart from competitors over the next decade. GO2030 has three clear priorities:

• Cost leadership: Enabling sustainable profitability in a highly pressured global environment.
• Integration excellence: Becoming the industry benchmark for integrating acquisitions, products and manufacturing into the supply chain across all functions and processes. Being better and faster than other companies, while creating value and securing a reliable, consistent supply of medicines for patients.
• Best-in-class safety and quality: Being recognised as the top company for safety and quality by embedding these topics into daily behaviours, ways of working and our organisational culture.

How does GO2030 support Grünenthal’s corporate strategy?

Victor: GO underpins everything at Grünenthal: From established brands through to acquisitions, growth, new products and R&D. Our people enable investment in innovation through cost leadership, bringing new medicines from R&D to market and ensuring a reliable global supply of medicines for patients. Simply put, GO is the backbone of Grünenthal’s strategy.

What external trends and challenges does GO2030 address?

Victor: Our three priorities address the challenging global landscape. We need to make Grünenthal as productive and efficient as possible to counteract cost pressures and inflation, especially in the US and Europe. These pressures on pricing highlight the significance of being cost leaders.

At the same time, it is paramount for GO to ensure an uninterrupted supply of medicines to patients. We are deeply serious about our mission of supplying safe, reliable, high-quality medicines to patients efficiently and cost-effectively. Despite global disruptions and challenges, Grünenthal has maintained continuous and uninterrupted supply of medicines to patients. Our goal is to continue this important work.

Grünenthal’s strength lies in its extensive, integrated global manufacturing network that covers Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) through to finished products, packaging and distribution worldwide. It gives us the control, resilience and flexibility that many competitors lack. Automation, artificial intelligence and digitalisation will support productivity, integration and decision-making, but as enablers, not as the strategy.

You mention AI and digital technologies, how big a role will they play in achieving GO2030?

Victor: We are experimenting broadly with AI and digital technologies, from due diligence and quality risk assessment to supply chain planning and yield optimisation all with mixed business results currently. But AI isn’t a strategy, it’s a mean to solving challenges, processing information, creating something new or making improvements. We are working to harness these innovations more fully to help us improve quality, costs, productivity and agility, applying them where they can truly add value and free up people to focus on what matters most.

How do people and Grünenthal’s culture support the achievement of these priorities? The people and culture are central to enabling all three priorities and out GO2030 transformation. Having the right people, with the right capabilities in the right place, engaged, motivated to grow and with the mindset to be active and proactive, make autonomous decisions and with entrepreneurial spirit is key to our future success. Without them our strategy is unsustainable.

What makes the culture you are building in Global Operations special or distinctive and what is meant by ‘living a culture of excellence’?

Victor: It starts with a clear common purpose that unites everyone everywhere, across the organisation: ensuring the safe, efficient, high quality and reliable supply of medicines to patients. We build from there, focusing on trust, ownership, accountability, ambition and autonomy – what I call freedom within a framework. We are clear about expectations and give people the freedom to act, challenge, learn and improve, taking responsibility for results.

Continuous improvement is ingrained in our DNA. People are not punished for mistakes they are encouraged to learn from them and move forward – that mindset is modelled from the top down. We never lose, we either win or learn. When you have an improvement mindset and couple this with humility, people not only feel trusted and safe to speak up and challenge the status quo but also to seek out new, different and better ways of doing things.

Our strength lies in our people. They have an entrepreneur mindset, want to leave behind a mark on the company, have a vision and can see beyond what feels possible right now to enable those future possibilities. The combination of a learning mindset, humility, and ambition makes magic happen and is the cultural engine behind GO2030 ensuring we are ‘living a culture of excellence.’

How do you align priorities for GO2030 across such a diverse and complex global organisation?

Victor: By being clear on our priorities, our vision and through co-creation to implement our strategy, deliver on our priorities and drive change as well as having clearly defined indicators of what success looks like and where we want to be.

We have a structured communications cascade that flows from global leadership to the manufacturing floor and back, with structured feedback loops for all employees to contribute, question, share ideas and challenge as needed. Our team feels empowered to challenge and understands their role to help us progress in a culture that is built on fairness, transparency and consistency. The progress made throughout GO2025 means that this culture is more embedded now although of course we are always looking to improve.

We have a saying in GO ‘Crew only, no passengers allowed!’ Everyone of our team plays an active clear role, has a voice and shares responsibility and ownership for shaping the future of GO and Grünenthal and ensuring we deliver on GO2030.

What excites you most about this journey?

Victor: I am excited about our future, about the company we are becoming and about the people who are defining our future. GO has transformed over the last eight years and I am inspired about what lies ahead. We have the ambition, vision, talent and momentum to build a very different and exciting company by 2030.

What message would you like to leave people with?

Victor: Know your impact, it’s bigger than you think. GO and GO2030 can fundamentally influence Grunenthal’s trajectory, serving more patients, enabling greater innovations and building a company that leaves its mark in a positive way and that we are proud of. We are a team of builders who want to shape the future, come join us, be a part of our ‘crew’.