‘Sometimes we forget that our products are taken by millions every day’

Roger Connor came back to say thanks. It was a nice touch for a man who spends most of his time these days juggling a team of 27,000 people at 72 outposts across the globe.

But, in Connor's view, his current role is down in no small part to a man he worked under many years ago in Cork and he was making time in his increasingly busy schedule to be present at the retirement party of Finbar Whyte.

Finbar Whyte may not be a household name though within the tight but extensive pharmaceuticals community in Ireland's second city, he needs no introduction. He was already an established general manager of Smithkline Beecham's Currabinny plant when that group merged in 2000 with British rival Glaxo to form GSK and remained site manager until his recent retirement.

And it was Whyte who spotted the talent in a young Northern finance executive.

Ironically, the role in Cork remains the only Irish posting in the CV of the Downpatrick man who left Northern Ireland more than 20 years ago with a degree in mechanical and manufacturing engineering from Queen's University Belfast to his name.

“Funny enough, I turned to the ‘dark side’ and became an accountant with PwC in Manchester and I just loved it,” laughs Connor. “But I always had this idea of bringing the engineering and the accountancy together, and I wanted to get into pharmaceuticals.”

So he joined British pharmaceutical firm Zeneca (now AstraZeneca). Shortly afterwards, he jumped ship to its larger UK rival Glaxo in 1998, lured by the opportunity to work in manufacturing.

“And that’s where I have been since,” says Connor. “I was in different finance roles within manufacturing and got to come to Cork . . . And it was Finbar who said to me, ‘We should get you out of finance and try you in some strategy production experience’.”

Connor completed a master’s part-time in Cambridge in manufacturing leadership before building experience in strategy and plant management in the UK.

“And Andrew [Witty, chief executive of GSK] then asked me if I would do this one.”

“This one” is president of global manufacturing and supply. More plainly, he is the man responsible for ensuring that the group’s sprawling network of manufacturing operations in consumer healthcare, pharmaceuticals and biopharma delivers product to markets globally, meeting stringent quality standards and on time, and prepares for new therapies working their way through the pipeline.

And, of course, he is responsible for ensuring this is done with ever increasing efficiency and cost effectiveness, for setting up new plants from scratch in growing markets and making the hard calls on closing factories no longer needed by the group. He is now in the role just over a year and, some might say strangely given the size of the challenges, considers he has his “dream job”.

“It is just a real privilege. I get to work with brilliant people, great technologies. The products we are bringing through to the market currently, in pharmaceuticals in particular, are going to make a real difference to people’s lives and we make some of them in Ireland too, which is good,” he says.

GSK may be a global business, with a growing focus on emerging markets, but its Irish plants continue to figure highly, Connor says, with the company employing 1,500 people here.

Almost half of those are in Dungarvan, Co Waterford, which is responsible for producing one of the group's consumer staples – Panadol.

"Dungarvan amazes me," Connor says. "It produces 12.5 billion tablets of Panadol. I was in Kenya and I went to a village and they introduced me and said, 'Roger is from GSK', and everyone looked blankly and then they said that Roger's company makes Panadol and the whole village just went 'Heyyeyeyey', and I wished I could have taped it for the guys in Dungarvan because sometimes we forget that our products are taken by millions every day."

Successful and all as Dungarvan is, there is always room for more and Connor takes Dungarvan as an example of the opportunities for improvement.

New product
"At the minute, you granulate the product, you compress it into a tablet, you coat it in a washing machine-type environment and then you pack it," he says. "Could you hook up those unit operations into one and have your product coming in one end and creating a coated tabled coming out the other?

“We think it is going to take some time but this is where we are working very closely with our pharmaceutical R&D people. You do that and that 12.5 billion tablets continues to grow.”

Dungarvan aside, GSK’s Cork site specialises in new product introduction. It has had problems when lower pipeline activity meant the plant had to “resize” – ie, cut jobs, with as many as 200 employees leaving the business between 2008 and 2010.

But it has taken the pain and, in Connor’s words, “created a very efficient platform”. While it remains focused on the pharma side of the business, its increased flexibility was evident in one of its recent roles – producing the active ingredient for Poligrip for dentures, a consumer product.

“It’s a technically brilliant site where we have invested €600 million since we opened. It is a tech powerhouse for our supply chain.”

And that brings us to Sligo – a plant that Connor says points to one very positive aspect for manufacturing in Ireland. When GSK acquired Stiefel in 2009, one of its first moves was to flag its Sligo plant for closure, with the loss of 250 jobs, in 2013.

At the time it didn’t need the capacity. As it happens, production at Sligo was slated to move to Barnard Castle, a GSK plant in northern England where Connor was then in his first posting as site director.

But circumstances changed, most notably in a decision by GSK consumer health to really push its dermatology/skin health business, planning a lot of product launches. Seeing the opening, plant executives in Sligo – which had been involved in pharmaceutical creams – made the case, with IDA Ireland in support, that it could deliver in that area on the cosmetic side.

“But what swung it for me at one level, I was going around the Stiefel factory when I’d confirmed it was closing, just saying thank you,” Connor recalls. “I wanted them to see the face of the person who was making some of these decisions.

Excellence
"And I was walking on one of the production lines and a lady was taking me through her improvement plan – her improvement plan? The factory was closing in six or nine months time and she was going through what she was going to get better today and what she was going to get better tomorrow and next week, and what she thought it could be by the end of the month.

“And I took her aside, out of earshot and I said: ‘Why are you bothering? Honestly, what is it?’ And she said because it is the right thing to do. ‘If I do this, I think I’ll be better and I’ll have a better story to tell, so I’ll get a job afterwards . . .

“If I could lift that woman’s attitude, approach, loyalty and drop it in to the 27,000 people who work for me, I could have my feet up,” says Connor. “Honestly, that is what excellence is and I don’t think it is something we value enough in Ireland. It is not in our style to shout about it but the environment and the work ethic of our people is brilliant.”

Connor is less willing to be drawn on the contentious issue of pricing in a world of shrinking health budgets. It’s outside his particular area of expertise, he says, though he notes: “What I do know is that we think we deserve fair recognition for the medicine, because we make good medicine and we make a difference to somebody’s life, we should be rewarded for that. How we determine the pricing environment, and ensuring it is fair, is important.”

He’s positive on the current process in Ireland, though he wouldn’t like to see prices go any lower “in terms of some of the cuts we have had to agree to, because I think you would then end up with an unsustainable infrastructure. And this team in Ireland had to go through a lot of resizing as a result of those price restructurings.”

China, where GSK has found itself mired in a bribery scandal over the past year, is another issue on which he is wary of comment.

“Our values in GSK are everything to us,” he says. “And that is why the China issue has been such a disappointment to many of us in the company. What do we do? Co-operate with the investigation, find out what has happened, fix it, and ensure that if there are any global learnings, we take them.

“I have to wait to see the reports. We have put in place new people and made sure we have a team that fully co-operates with the investigations - a team to run the business and to re-establish our reputation. We have great products; China is a great market; that is the disappointing thing.”

For Ireland, Connor is aware of some of the sacrifices made under the Troika, and broadly welcomes them, urging Government to “keep the focus and make sure some of the programmes that are in place remain in place. That’s what drives our investment decisions because that economic stability is critical to us”, he notes.

Where he does see room for improvement is in building links between industry and academia, arguing that what he calls a “sandbox” approach has yet to develop properly in Ireland – or in competing markets such as Singapore or UK, the markets GSK traditionally look at for process development.

But his main focus is creating new ways to make things more efficiently. “We are still making some of our products with technologies which are several decades old and we can really step change. I want to look at new ways of manufacturing the chemical the active pharmaceutical ingredients so we can get that unit cost down.

“I get that unit cost down and we can drive access to that product in parts of the world which would not be able to afford it before. It is a big part of GSK’s overall goal. We want to innovate because innovation drives some access. That has to be very exciting for our teams because technically that is a challenge.”

Exciting indeed. And Connor certainly sounds engaged in the GSK “plan”.

"I think I have been quite lucky, lucky to have some great people I have worked for who took a chance on me," he concludes.

CV: Roger Connor
Name: Roger Connor
Age: 44
Position: President and head of global manufacturing and supply at GlaxoSmithKline
Family: Married to Denise and he has two little girls – Emma and Sarah – born in Cork
Hobbies/interest: "I run . . . I've done five marathons. I've got another one in me but I haven't told my wife. The training is pretty hard but I got close to three hours; if I could break three hours . . . but that is going to take a lot. I'd love to do another one but I'm getting a bit older now and a few more travelling requirements."
Something you might expect: He is bullish on the prospects for GSK which, having come through a lean spell, boats one of the most active in-house pipelines in the industry with more than 20 new approvals in recent years and a further half dozen candidates at an advanced trial stage.
Something that might surprise: For an executive in a sector regularly driven by M&A, he finds mergers a distraction. "Having lived through big mergers within this organisation, it occupies a huge amount of leadership time when you are bringing companies together."