Rethinking BioManufacturing to Optimize Production Time, Yield and Costs
Rethink biomanufacturing in 3 easy steps to optimize production time, yield, and costs.
Biotechnology companies play a crucial role in advancing scientific research and developing innovative therapies to increase the healthy life expectancy of the global population as a whole. However, these companies often encounter significant challenges when it comes to optimizing production time, yield, and costs. To overcome these challenges, companies need to rethink their approach with a view to optimizing in 3 steps:
Step 1: Improve Production Flows and Remove Bottlenecks
Step 2: Standardize Operations
Step 3: Achieve Sustainable Planning & Scheduling
Step 1: Improve Production Flows and Remove Bottlenecks
Optimizing production schedules to ensure production flow without bottlenecks, requires optimizing key resources – materials, equipment and people. And, as biologics based therapeutic production relies on complex manufacturing processes that are sensitive to fluctuations, quality control and quality testing laboratories become an important part of the process.
Ensuring there is the correct amount of scarce and expensive material on hand, that the equipment down time for qualification, calibration or maintenance does not impact output and planning not just the number of operators on hand but the additional dimensions of trained and certified operators is very important.
The quality laboratory also has challenges balancing resources to meet the increased number of samples that need testing. Delays in testing can result in product being held prior to moving to the next step in production, to product being held in quarantine prior to release to patients, to worldwide drug shortages.
Read more about this step and learn how to successfully manage all products and process related constraints.
Step 2: Standardize Operations
In this step, the manufacturing landscape is standardized by optimizing performance through coordination of production activities such as orders, inventory and quality, while improving visibility, control and synchronization of global production. Biopharma companies can generate a blueprint for one manufacturing facility and then stamp that common standardized blueprint out to other facilities, standardizing the work instructions, shop floor equipment integration and harmonizing quality control.
Connecting the on-hand raw materials, consumables and parts stored in the warehouse that are used during the assembly process to the shop floor assembly process, and managing the outgoing final materials coming from the shop floor to the warehouse for shipment ensures operations performance is optimized.
Step 3: Achieve Sustainable Planning & Scheduling
Creating optimized schedules that balance production efficiency and delivery performance is critical to success for biopharma manufacturers. Companies need to be able to define what to produce and when to produce it, considering the full supply network; coordinating all plants: API, Secondary and fill & finish, CMOs and CDMOs to optimize enterprise tactical planning and decide when and in which plant / line the drug will be produced.
In addition, being able to predict future drugs demand, and accurately plan supply through an optimized supply chain based on the forecasted patient demands input is paramount to improving production agility. Whether this is to Launch a new drug or transform the already existing S&OP process for a current drug on the market, creating a unified, scheduling consensus-based business plan that enables inventory cost control while vastly improving service levels is key.
Sustainable Planning & Scheduling for Biomanufacturing
The challenges brought on by the pandemic have demonstrated the need for a complete redesign of the life sciences supply chain. Learn how to do this today.