| The pharmaceutical industry has been host to mounting competitive pressure between manufacturers over the last 10 years. Brian Holliday at Siemens discusses the need to increase manufacturing efficiency, reduce costs and accelerate new product time-to-market, due to increasing R&D costs, regulatory overheads and price reduction demands
MANUFACTURING INEFFICIENCY
Despite the increasing necessity to ensure factories have efficient manufacturing systems, the pharmaceutical industry still appears to be plagued by manufacturing inefficiencies when compared to their peers. Historically, pharmaceuticals have cited regulatory demands as a reason for being slow to adopt manufacturing change. However, in the current market pharmaceutical manufacturers must change their ways in order to survive. Even regulatory bodies such as the FDA are pushing the pharmaceutical manufacturer to embrace technologies such as process and analytical technologies (PAT) that promote process understanding and continuous improvement for the sake of ultimate customer safety.
However, readily available solutions to some of these issues seem to be passing by unnoticed. Manufacturing execution systems (MES) allow the seamless flow of information from the business level to the factory and shop floor and vice versa. Bridging this information gap between the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and the plant floor is widely accepted as a prerequisite for a successful production strategy. It appears, however, that much of the manufacturing industry remains somewhat in the dark as to the business benefits of an MES system. Consequently, improvements in three of the major issues within the pharmaceutical industry, which can be defined as asset efficiency, operating margin and revenue growth, are now beginning to separate the industry leaders from those struggling to compete in a fierce market. |
