Pharmaceutical & Chemical

The pharmaceutical industry has unique challenges. High regulatory requirements. High profitability targets. High pressures to maintain safety and to innovate. How do you even begin? By leveraging their existing investment in continuous improvement professionals, by recognizing that the regulatory and core business processes – internal and external – are as important as the operational processes, and by concentrating on the supply chain.

One international pharmaceutical company was experiencing extraordinary start-up demand for one of its new biotechnology-based drugs. Every day of lost revenue put them one day closer to the expiration of its patent. Together with the client, we worked on the following issues:

• Reduced changeover and clean out time in the bioreactor operations. The team implemented standard set-up reduction tools, revised standard operating instructions, and delivered supervisor training. The result was increased annual revenue of more than $2 million per reactor vessel.
• A redesign of the multi-country supply chain increased capacity in packaging operations reducing costly, time-sensitive inventory by more than 300 days.
• A revised scheduling system for the quality control lab doubled output and reduced average lead time by more than 50 percent.
• Developed and implemented lean certification and training for all key continuous improvement professionals enabling the client to independently and consistently drive improvement in their worldwide operations.

Asked what all this meant to them, one senior executive note “Immediate availability and profitability”.