Excellence in Production: A Critical Contribution to the Pharmaceutical Industry
By: Gerald Buerkle, Vice President, Production at Vetter Pharma-Fertigung GmbH & Co. KG
When it comes to the production of high-quality pharmaceuticals, excellence is the name of the game – in all production areas. It is the overarching goal of a well-defined course of action for process optimization. The strategy of an excellence process in production is to further simplify and streamline processes, improving their efficiency and effectiveness while reducing human errors. Though challenging, the processes offer significant potential to fulfill the increasing expectations of customers and regulatory bodies. Essential to this task is a pathway that involves an intelligently designed internal optimization process that takes a holistic approach by spanning the entire production system, including processes, employees, and technologies across all production locations, departments, and hierarchies. The result is a realignment and development of the entire system in the best way possible.
At Vetter, an end-to-end process was essential. The developed internal optimization process named ProdEx (Production Excellence) has proven indispensable for a positive development of a production that is highly regulated, customer transparent, complex, and know-how intensive. Sustainable results are achieved by creating a team of internal experts and involvement of all executives with a goal of designing and implementing solutions “from production for production” using internal resources. The result is a holistic approach for all production locations as well as with other technical departments. The team manages the launch and implementation of the measures and controls the overall coordination of subsequent steps designed to further improve processes.
Production Excellence is often best achieved when combining and customizing aspects of a large spectrum of known and self-developed process optimization methods, including, eg, Lean Management, Six Sigma, Statistics, and Kanban. By applying these principles to its manufacturing process throughout the past few years, Vetter has demonstrated significant results, including checking and termination of processes that have no identifiable value-added elements, the implementation of a digital micro-malfunction management system, and the development of a comprehensive program to avoid human error based on the pillars of “Process, Organization and Human Factors.” In total, production flexibility, and increased efficiency – all while meeting an increase in quality assurance requirements from customers and authorities alike, is being achieved.
For the pharmaceutical industry, Production Excellence offers huge potential. Through continued information exchanges with other highly regulated industries, Vetter will continue to demonstrate significant progress. Perhaps the German industrialist Philip Rosenthal said it best, “Those who don’t believe they can get better have stopped being good.”
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