Pharmaceutical Industry

Profitability under Fire

The global economic recession has only heightened the pace at which pharmaceutical and biotech companies are working to acquire new product lines, reduce costs and sustain efficiency improvements. In addition to today’s market challenges, TBM Consulting Group’s pharmaceutical clients face patent expirations, weak product development pipelines, downward pricing pressures, and an increasingly burdensome regulatory environment. On the positive side they’re struggling to integrate operations and maximize top-line growth from major acquisitions. They’re also responding to double-digit sales increases in China and other rapidly expanding markets.

To maintain profitability and manage growth, we are helping pharmaceutical companies transform their operations by adopting innovative business processes and broaden their focus on best practices beyond R&D. In a world that demands immediate access to the latest drug therapies and flu vaccines, speed-to-market and high quality go hand in hand. It should not require eight weeks of paperwork to support a four-hour production run. Well-designed and executed business processes can deliver both high quality and short lead times between production and product shipment.

TBM has helped pharmaceutical and biotech companies streamline new product introductions, release capacity and increase productivity. We’ve helped our clients:

• Manage process deviations and perform in-line testing to complete batch records in real time
• Boost capacity by reducing excessively long changeover times and cleaning cycles
• Create a culture that identifies and solves problems where and when they occur
• Avoid unnecessary capital expenditures while ensuring product availability
• Eliminate unplanned equipment downtime
• Align regulatory compliance processes with requirements
• Simplify paperwork processes prior to automation
• Reduce excessive energy costs
• Engage and empower employees to ensure ownership, reduce high turnover, and improve quality
• Rapidly and effectively integrate new acquisitions

With so many opportunities it can be difficult to know where to start. TBM can help you set business priorities and fully leverage Lean and Six Sigma techniques, which we combine as Lean Sigma. We start by helping you build your continuous improvement team’s knowledge and skills, including thorough training, exposure to best practice operations, and personal coaching that will ultimately enable your organization to become self-sufficient. Using a combination of project teams and the kaizen breakthrough methodology, we help clients move their operations forward simultaneously in multiple areas. Kaizen teams dramatically improve quality, implement standard operating procedures, create visual factories, free up expensive clean room space for new products, and deliver bottom-line results in line with the strategic objectives of your organization.

It sounds simple. But as any business leader knows who has dabbled in these techniques and tried to implement such a program with lackluster results, it’s all too easy to become distracted by daily output demands and fall back into old habits. The hardest part is always cultural, which provides the foundation for sustainable progress. If it were easy, everyone would do it and there would be no competitive advantage.

Some of the characteristics that distinguish the operations of our Lean Sigma pharmaceutical clients include:

• Ubiquitous visual production status and quality indicators
• A strong emphasis on improvement through constant training and communication
• Superior order-to-shipment cycle times
• Integrated and responsive supply chains based on partnerships and characterized by rapid information and material flow

TBM business consultants have worked with global pharmaceutical industry clients to generate breakthrough improvements to their production operations. To learn more about our experience and how we can help your company move forward, contact us at 91.124.437.5995.