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Vector’s pharmaceutical consulting practice offers solutions for organizations involved in pharmaceutical research &amp; development (R&amp;D), production, export, and distribution of medicines helping them address ongoing challenges or constraints in operations, R&amp;D, distribution, or the management of QC labs.&nbsp;Vector’s innovative solutions have helped Ajanta Pharma, Lupin, and Strides resolve their lab quality issues, reduce R&amp;D lead time and improve delivery performance while enhancing the productivity of resources.

Organisations working in the area of life sciences, especially those dealing with research, development, production, export or distribution of pharmaceutical drugs and formulations, can have an ongoing challenge or a constraint in Operations, Research & Development or in Distribution to International Warehouses.

Life Sciences

While the pharmaceutical industry faces many unique challenges, the fairly healthy gross margins this industry enjoys have made it possible for businesses to thrive during good times and remain viable even through tough times. However, with unprecedented and increasing competition, business complexity, velocity and volatility of markets, companies are now struggling with stressed supply chains, profit erosion, and continuously lowering returns.

Industries

We have partnered with some of the major names in the pharmaceutical industry to create and implement radical solutions which have helped redefine industry benchmarks. These include:

Clients

Pharmaceutical manufacturing plants are characterised by a large number of dedicated product routings/flow lines, coupled with a high degree of variability in manufacturing capacity (downtime and batch time) and RM availability. The practice of planning and scheduling of pharmaceutical manufacturing over long horizons results in the piling up of WIP over certain product routes. This, in turn, creates an overloading of work centers on that route. At the same time, due to the commonality of raw materials, some of the other product routes/flow lines may be starving. This erratic starvation or overloading of work centers that pharma manufacturing plants often experience leads to highly variable lead times and delays in order/ batch completion. Expediting delayed orders forces frequent changes in schedules. This causes capacity/output loss. Consequent issues pharma companies face include the exigency of new product launches, write-offs/ discounting of FG, and expensive air freights. Sales and profitability of many companies in the pharma industry are steadily deteriorating even as the companies’ investment in inventory, capital costs, and operating expenses are increasing.&nbsp;Find out how Vector’s pharma consulting practice can enable life science companies engaged in pharma manufacturing to ensure 100% On-Time-In-Full deliveries at a significantly reduced lead time. Also find out how firms can achieve this while they increase plant output and significantly lower the working capital deployed in their businesses.

Operations

reduction in overall lead time

Around

increase in output of plants

reduction in WIP

About

Improvement in working capital cycle of the company

Generic pharma R&amp;D departments of life sciences companies suffer a perennial mismatch between capacity and load. This becomes more evident towards the end of the second and fourth quarters of the year. Critical resources are extremely busy during these months. In the first part of the year, the resources have to complete Exhibit Batch-related tasks. At the end of the year, they have to attend to submission requirements followed by a spate of FDA queries. All these ‘urgent’ tasks have to be addressed by the same set of resources that are stretched beyond capacity. This is a problem that pharmaceutical companies have been unable to solve with traditional project management tools.&nbsp;Vector’s pharmaceutical consulting practice uses principles of Flow Management to help companies in the pharmaceutical industry complete R&amp;D projects at significantly lower lead times (without increased investment in resources).

Research & Development

reduce project lead time

Upto

increased output without additional resources

International warehouses for generic pharma companies, whether owned by a life science company or maintained by a distribution partner in that country, need to maintain adequate stock so they (the warehouses) can meet the varying local demand and can offset the highly varying lead times of manufacturing and supply. This is a tightrope walk for them. Fear of sales loss and the heavy penalties on unavailability imposed by some countries force these warehouses to hold significantly high levels of pharmaceutical inventory. However, stocking too much inventory comes with the risk of many of these reaching near or crossing the expiration date. The distribution channel will be very reluctant to accept pharmaceutical stock nearing expiry. If the pharmaceuticals’ expiration date is crossed, the warehouse will have to destroy it!&nbsp;&nbsp;Companies in the pharmaceutical industry manufacturing generic pharmaceuticals can solve the ‘too much or too little’ conundrum by ensuring that their international warehouses have 100% availability at low inventory. Find out how, Vector’s pharmaceutical consulting service can help companies harmonize their supply chain operations.

Distribution to International Warehouses

improvement of availability

Near

reduction in inventory

response rate for any surge demand

improvement in working capital cycle of the company

Quality Control Laboratory (QC Lab) serves one of the important functions in pharmaceutical production and control. Quality tests are numerous, varied, stringent and time-consuming. Therefore, in order to ensure that manufacturing goes on unhindered, the QC Lab must perform all the required tests, right from raw material, in-process &amp; finished goods efficiently while also ensuring compliance as per regulatory guidelines. However, despite careful planning, a high frequency of occurrence of OOS (Out of Specification, i.e., breach of the allowed upper/ lower limit of the parameters of drug testing), especially invalid OOS cases (breach not due to the drug itself, but because of the lab testing or manufacturing processes) and lab incidents (process deviation) plague this department, raising doubts about the robustness of testing/ manufacturing with the auditing agencies.&nbsp;&nbsp;Some of the typical solutions companies tend to take to solve these issues are to increase the level of supervision in the lab, to put the analysts through more training, and to add resources to reduce the load on the system. However, these steps, while offering some improvement, are not sustainable, or the benefits stagnate after a point.&nbsp;The key to sustained and continuous improvement in quality departments is to first address the cognitive overload in the system with the objective of bringing down manual errors (Type A) to minimal levels. Then, the systemic errors (Type B) due to incorrect methods followed, unclear procedures, etc., will become visible, and actions can be taken to rectify them. Find out more.

Quality Control Laboratory

Reduction in invalid Out of Specification (OOS) to near Zero

Reduction in lab incident to test ratio

Reduction in human-based lab incidents

Reduction in non-core activities of analysts

Supply chain inefficiencies continue to challenge pharma and life-sciences players despite significant investments in off-the-shelf software. Standard forecasting-based supply chain management solutions fall short due to the high and highly variable lead time of input materials, unpredictable demand patterns and the complexities and uncertainties of managing production to remain compliant in a heavily regulated environment. The result? Frequent stockouts resulting in penalties or backorders, excess slow-moving inventory resulting in obsolescence, endemic delays in order fulfilment resulting in high airfreights, and operational inefficiencies.&nbsp;At Vector Consulting Group, we take a different approach. Our pharma and life-sciences practice&nbsp;combines client-specific solution design with our proprietary, custom-built platform - VectorFLOW, enabling agility at a lower working capital requirement in the supply chain by a pull-based replenishment and load-based order fulfilment models instead of relying on inaccurate demand forecasts.&nbsp;Unlike generic supply chain software, VectorFLOW adapts to real-world complexities with intelligent solutions. It achieves improved reliability for end customers by:&nbsp;<ol><li>Consumption-based high-frequency order creation of input materials</li><li>Dynamic adjustment of inventory targets based on past consumption and future demand patterns</li><li>Full kit availability for improved production planning and material expediting</li><li>Daily detection of overload and underload situations of different machines in the plant across multiple horizons</li><li>Integrating QC with production using a common priority system</li></ol>&nbsp;By integrating procurement, production, quality control and market demands, VectorFLOW eliminates manual inefficiencies and provides real-time insights into building improved responsiveness at reduced overall costs.&nbsp;Move beyond outdated, forecast-dependent models. Discover how VectorFLOW can transform your supply chain.

Technology Solutions

Vector Consulting Group offers consulting services to enable life sciences and pharmaceutical companies to improve output from R&D and manufacturing, reduce inventory, lead time and improve overall profits.