Operations Management in Pharmaceutical Manufacturers

Operations Management in Pharmaceutical Manufacturers

  • Submitted By: pelicano
  • Date Submitted: 02/15/2009 9:56 AM
  • Category: Business
  • Words: 850
  • Page: 4
  • Views: 1227

The pharmaceutical manufacturers are required to apply operations management to be able to supply the demands of the targeted market. This is an old concept on which the companies has been struggle for years, trying and applying new ways of do things, all looking for efficient and effective supply of product. Just in Time and Kan-Ban tools were successfully established by Johnson and Johnson (J&J) making them leaders in the supply chain process effectiveness in the pharmaceutical industries. With this philosophy and tools, they established a process where the supply chain was segmented in stations. These stations were replenished immediately after a station was empty; therefore the supply required for starting a station operation was never interrupted. J&J created a continuous supply reducing the weeks of supply to the minimum reducing the inventory.
Once they started, the process never stopped for others in the industry to go and try with many different names pursuing fast, effective and efficient supply chain operation. In the company I direct the main focus for years was quality systems and control due to legal restrictions with the regulatory agency. This situation took the organization, even with low production volumes into a supply chain paralysis. The company ended with solid, robust and reliable systems that do not allow the supply to deliver the final product to the customer on time. This cause further impacted the supply, by creating higher inventory levels of raw materials and components, which on the same time impacted all areas in the internal supply.
The CEO started the transformation process he called “the turn around phase” where he established an organizational structure creating global groups and site functions to assure an effective deployment of the new ways of working. As presented in figure no. 1, the site function has an organizational structure similar to the one usually used for manufacturing where the quality assurance element...

Similar Essays