Three pharma companies driving operational excellence

Operational excellence (OPEX) is a key goal for any competitive organization, as speed, efficiency and any other benefits afforded by optimized processes are critical enablers to success. It is especially true in the pharmaceutical industry, where intense competition and strict regulations make it essential that processes are optimized to avoid losing time and resources attempting to beat the competition to market or ensuring compliance.

Here we will look into some examples of how pharmaceutical organizations have been optimizing processes and leveraging technologies such as artificial intelligence to drive OPEX.

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Merck automates production processes

Many challenges pharmaceutical companies face revolve around how to be faster, cheaper, more compliant and more sustainable. As such, there has been an effort in the pharmaceutical space to automate elements of the manufacturing process to enhance speed and efficiency and eliminate human error.

In December 2020, Merck teamed up with Siemens with the goal of achieving automation for its modular production, to allow for more flexible and efficient manufacturing and to better deliver treatments and medicines to customers. Kai Beckmann, CEO performance materials and executive board member at Merck, stated at the time:

“The time needed from the product idea to market readiness is a critical success factor. [Digital manufacturing] allows data-based decisions to be made as early as the product development phase and applied seamlessly to the production process. Therefore, in the future, we will be able to respond quicker and even more flexibly to high customer requirements.”

Related content: Using real-time data analytics to achieve manufacturing excellence

How Elekta improved operational efficiency with a centralized digital platform

Another example of operational excellence in the pharmaceutical space comes from Elekta, a manufacturer of radiotherapy treatment for cancer and brain disorders.

Upon reviewing its business processes in 2017, Elekta found that its paper-based records were both costly and inefficient, with manual execution of processes such as compliance checks leading to costly errors. Physical documents for just one medical product would require 800 manual signatures and 1,200 folders per year.

To address this, the company decided to implement a centralized data management system that would enable staff to view its products, processes, auditing information and track orders via a digital platform.

The result has been significant, with Elekta reporting that it has doubled revenue over the last five years, with orders at one facility rising almost 35 percent. Aside from this, the business has achieved cost savings of around $85,000 from printing and storage following the switch.

Mark Kaak, VP for global manufacturing at Elekta, noted: “The payback is already coming from cost savings, increased efficiency and easier compliance. We also benefit from freeing up resources to enable our business to innovate more and greater agility to respond to our customers’ demands.”

How Sanofi accelerates time to market with artificial intelligence

The speed of drug production has always been a key factor in determining how competitive a pharmaceutical organization can be. When seeking to develop a drug to treat a particular disease or condition, it is unlikely that a pharmaceutical organization will be alone in doing so. As such, optimizing efficiency to allow drugs to be brought to market as quickly as possible should be a major goal for any pharmaceutical business.

Matt Truppo, global head of research platforms at Sanofi, noted in an interview with Pharma IQ that the pharmaceutical giant has been taking steps to enhance time-to-market through the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate drug discovery and development and deliver higher quality and better targeted molecules.

Related content: Leveraging intelligent automation to link strategy with process improvement

AI is able to analyze much larger data sets than humans and make recommendations based on that data much faster than humans can. Sanofi is applying it to clinical research data to make on potential molecules that could treat the targeted ailment, which has accelerated the process significantly according to Truppo

“When you start to think about the data and how can you more precisely identify the target we should go after, [using AI] is how we are able to accelerate time to market and also gain a higher probability of success in the clinic, which ultimately leads to increased productivity,” he explains.

What are your thoughts about the efforts to drive OPEX in pharma? Let us know in the comments below.