Ajanta Pharma Ltd.

Ajanta Pharma Limited is a multinational company based in India engaged in development, manufacturing, and marketing of pharmaceutical formulations. The pharmaceutical industry is a complex highly regulated environment which experiences high variability in demand, and highly rigid manufacturing processes. In this challenging environment, most companies experience several operational and financial issues like lack of timely availability of all materials (RM/PM) for dispensing, simultaneously overloaded and underloaded of production routes, poor capacity utilisation, lower than expected output, creation of immediately unwanted inventory, airfreight and other expediting costs and poor on time performance.
Ajanta Pharma realised that with increasing competition and volatility of markets, the incumbent practice of manufacturing based on forecast is not good enough for them to respond with agility to market and business environment changes. Therefore, the company decided to abandon forecast based planning and opt for a more dynamic approach to manufacturing which responds daily to emergent machine loads. They also decoupled the procurement and quality teams so that they, protected from the vagaries in manufacturing, can ensure continuous availability of full kits as per the priority in manufacturing. With this new approach and by enabling auto replenishment of RM/PM, the company experienced better synchronization of full kit for dispensing both from procurement and QC, timely visibility of any shortages, better synchronization in FG QA stage for BMR (Batch Manufacturing Record), BPR (Batch Packing Record) & QMS activities, and elimination of stress across all functions in the plant. Crashing of lead times by one third and the ability to track orders on a day to day basis also makes managing demand easier for marketing and other stakeholders.
Some of the salient results of implementing the new dynamic approach to pharma operations is shown below: Some of the salient results of implementing the new dynamic approach to pharma operations is shown below:

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