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Streamlining Production Process in the Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

Streamlining Production Process in the Pharmaceutical Manufacturing 700 500 Xcelpros Team
  • There’s a consistent demand to scale capacity when it comes to pharma manufacturing as healthcare demand continues to rise globally.
  • Cost-savings, shorter turnaround time, and enhanced productivity are some of the key criteria for top executives in pharma manufacturing companies.
  • Automation of production lines, minimizing raw material wastage, stakeholder synchronization, optimized resource allocation, etc. are some of the ways with which pharma manufacturing can be streamlined.

Around the world, we continue to see rising demand for access to quality healthcare. Side-effects of the recent pandemic significantly added to this demand. This has placed a lot of pressure on pharma and biotech manufacturing companies, who are finding it difficult to:

  • Streamline research and development (R&D) processes.
  • Reduce overall costs and improve time to market.
  • Ensure 100% safety and regulatory compliance.
  • Enhance production capacity.
  • Expand market reach.

Pharma manufacturers must constantly upgrade their game regarding R&D, operations, production, and distribution with newer technologies and strategic business moves. With signs indicating the industry is poised for extraordinary growth, it’s becoming a given that manufacturers will need to invest in leaner, more agile production processes.

According to the 2020-2027 Pharmaceutical Market Size Report, by Grand View Research, the global pharmaceutical manufacturing market size was valued at USD 324.42 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.74% from 2020 to 2027.

These growth stats put focus on the need for ramping up production without compromising on safety, all while ensuring consistent profitability.

Key Factors in Pharma Manufacturing

Before we look into how manufacturing in pharma companies can be streamlined, we must consider some key processes involved.

1.Robust R&D: For pharma and biotech companies, continued investment in laboratories is essential in ensuring long-term success. With Robust R&D comes increased chances for innovation, which can define a pharma company’s overall market position in terms of being the first to manufacture a ground-breaking formula. The strategic movement towards streamlined manufacturing begins with ensuring superior, quality research in the labs.

2.Raw Material Acquisition and Distribution: Whether it’s small-molecule or biological drugs, pharma companies typically depend on an intricate network of raw material manufacturers and distributors to acquire safe and superior-quality products. In addition, complex formulations require compounds manufactured across multiple facilities to be stored and transported in optimal conditions. Manufacturers could be dependent on multiple different suppliers for raw materials globally.

3.Managed Production Lines: Today, pharma companies are more dependent than ever on fast-paced production lines backed by technology-enabled batch manufacturing, serialization, and traceability. Bridging the gap between hardware and software for streamlined drug production can make a huge difference in speed to market.

Manufacturing Process Issue/ Roadblocks How Technology Can Help
R&D Prone to human error, slower processes Automated data integration and analysis, AI for molecular identification
Supply Chain Highly complex, data discrepancies or duplication, missing information, stock-outs Centralized SCM for real-time visibility, centralized data access, real-time stakeholder communication, inventory management in ERP
Drug Manufacturing/ Production Shop floor to top floor communication glitches, communication time-gaps, human errors in reporting/ record maintenance Automated production lines, report generation in ERP, real-time communication between shop floor and top floor
Quality Control Counterfeits, fake drugs, human errors, formulation errors Computerized serialization, use of blockchain to ensure drug safety

4.Competent Supply Chains: Healthcare is a global business and, now more than ever, pharma manufacturers are dealing with complex supply chains involving multiple stakeholders spread worldwide. Ensuring that these supply chains are competently managed is critical to ensuring the overall streamlining of pharma manufacturing.

5.Quality Checks: When it comes to drug manufacturing, anything less than 100 percent is often unacceptable. Pharma companies are well aware of the perils of lawsuits, license cancellations, and other dire consequences regarding quality management. At every stage of pharma manufacturing, quality checks are paramount to ensuring drug safety and compliance with all required healthcare regulations.

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How Can Pharma Manufacturers Streamline Their Production Processes?

Pharmaceutical companies are embracing newer and newer technologies for quicker results, better process management, and enhanced productivity. Still, there’s a lot more that pharma manufacturers and their CDMOs can do to enhance the overall pharmaceutical production process for significantly better results.

  • Integrating new technology in the lab is proven effective in accelerating research and innovation. Leveraging Big Data and Analytics for data collation, integration, and insights generation from clinical trials can expedite the process and ensure accuracy and transparency. Similarly, computational permutations are effective in molecule identification for a particular drug. Gene sequencing, digital record maintenance, computerized medical equipment, etc., are becoming game changers in strengthening R&D and the production process typical in pharma manufacturing.
  • Pharmaceutical shop floors can and should be well-integrated with the IT infrastructure on the top floor. By embracing software-managed production lines, manufacturers can leverage automation for faster and error-free processes. Similarly, production supervisors can benefit from the automated data flow from an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to and back from the production lines. This software can manage tasks like reporting and serialization to save time and cost.
  • Newer technologies and software for SCM are becoming pivotal in helping pharma companies stay on top of complex supply chains and distribution networks. IoT solutions are leveraged in pharma manufacturing and distribution for real-time monitoring and communication. Better shipping times and inventory management become possible through effective data analysis. Many companies also use blockchain to ensure data security and encryption while managing complex supply chain networks globally.
  • The use of blockchain and comprehensive ERP software (for serialization) are also helping manufacturers ensure drug safety. Since these tools and technologies provide the option of complete traceability (from production to patent), drug counterfeits become extremely difficult, if not impossible. Drug quality and safety are major concerns for manufacturers, and optimal use of technology can ensure quality checks, thereby saving efforts, costs, and time.

Final Thoughts

Pharmaceutical manufacturers are embracing newer technologies for better production and profitability. With these technological advancements, companies could achieve their manufacturing goals without compromising quality and safety.

  • Newer technologies and software such as IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, SCM, and ERP play important roles in streamlining manufacturing processes in pharma.
  • Pharma companies need to reinvent themselves technologically to keep up with the complex and ever-expanding canvas of global healthcare.

Resources: Workflow Software for Improved Healthcare Solutions

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Standard Costing in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing : Industry Challenges & Solutions

Standard Costing in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing : Industry Challenges & Solutions 700 500 Xcelpros Team

At a Glance

Costing methods for pharmaceutical manufacturing, especially the standard cost method, can significantly help reduce hidden costs.

  • On average, 30% of costs go undetected due to poor business practices and the inability to detect them.
  • Improper habits of recording data can be a major culprit in accumulated hidden costs.
  • The Standard Cost Method provides a simpler solution, offering insights into daily cost, cost variance and profitability analysis for pharmaceutical manufacturing companies.

Introduction

Forecasters are projecting more opportunities for mid-market pharmaceutical companies operating in the US. These opportunities will require more streamlined processes within pharmaceutical manufacturing and contract development and manufacturing organizations (CMOs and CDMOs). The most recent projections included the following:

  • The global medicine market is expected to top $1.4 trillion by the end of 2021, Grand View Research states. Anticipated spending on medicine in the U.S. alone is expected to grow to $655 billion at a rate of 4% – 7% by 2023. followed by pharmerging countries —emerging nations in areas such as Africa and parts of Asia—hitting $385 billion (5% – 8% compound annual growth rate) and the top five European countries at $225 billion (1% – 4%). Japan will either lose 3% or stay even, a report from the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science notes.
  • Rising research and development (R&D) costs are being accompanied by more stringent testing requirements.
  • American companies introduced 138 new chemical or biological entities (NCEs and NBEs) between 2016-2020, according to Statisa.com. Europe produced 64, Japan released 38 and the rest of the world generated 48 for a total of 288 during that span. This compares to 226 from 2011-2015 and 146 a decade earlier, IFPMA states.

Figure: 1Global Pharmaceutical Market sales in 2019

Global Pharmaceutical Market sales in 2019

Change Accounting Methods

Adapting to these changing market dynamics requires changes in accounting across the pharmaceutical industry. Companies will need to become more sophisticated when it comes to their methods of costing, profitability analysis and production variance calculation and reporting.

A few ways to achieve these goals include standard costing methods, following best practices and optimization within a pharmaceutical batch manufacturing company. Also fairly critical in today’s highly-regulated environment will be much more accurate reporting of data.

The Never-Ending Challenges of C-Level Reporting

Determining the overall profitability for a product is a major concern for any C-Level executive. Calculating cost structure in the pharmaceutical industry is especially tough to determine when it involves fast-moving raw materials, labor, overheads and other indirect costs.

For pharmaceutical companies, one prime objective is following standard operating procedures (SOPs) in adherence with the FDA’s compliance reporting rules. In the past, companies have placed so much focus on staying compliant it becomes easy to lose sight of key indicators that drive profitability and organizational goals.

In continuous production and batch manufacturing processes, the multitude of activities involved requires costing for each activity. This can be tough as many moving parts make it hard to identify the right cost breakdown structure. Despite the difficulties, companies must measure true costs for stakeholder reporting.

True costs vary from those assigned by traditional cost-accounting methods by 30 to 100 percent.Source: -Per McKinsey

What matters to the CFO?

CFOs don’t look at a single product or product line. Instead, they often prefer a much broader view when determining what matters the most, like the details needed to determine actual costs and how any variances came to be.

Since the manufacturing process is so heavily intertwined with product costing, the need to highlight different elements that aid in standard cost determination and variance reporting becomes even greater. Some reporting structures use backflush costing methods to delay costing until an item is manufactured. This can be a reporting nightmare when it comes to analytics and production performance metrics.

It’s common for some people to analyze these costs and variances using things like Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with complex macros and v-lookups. Analyzing true costs this way is extremely challenging, especially when your system doesn’t keep track of perpetual costs until the completion of a production job.

Data Capture Discipline and Lost Visibility

Longer production campaigns in continuous processing can have individual processes taking days, weeks or sometimes months. Recording actual numbers based on material and resource consumption to report standards compared to actuals becomes tedious. Enforcing process discipline is one way to help streamline this part of the job.

Gaining clarity and determining actual costs can take hours of data crunching, the process becomes harder and more complex when you take into account any reworked batches or lots. All the different moving parts of reworked jobs can make it tough to determine the additional cost of starting materials, line clearance, labor and machine hours that get compounded to the original batch cost.

Human capital, machine or work center hours need to be planned across multiple production jobs. Proper planning helps accurately source and schedule labor while allocating machines to each production run.

5%

High-performance pharmaceutical companies have about 3% of rework products when compared to the average companies that have about 8%

Source: -Per McKinsey

People and Processes Impact Costs and Profitability

A large amount of time and resources are spent trying to recover inefficiencies caused by following improper procedures in day-to-day operations. These inefficiencies may be due to the lack of any properly identified key performance indicators (KPIs), processes or methods to track efficiencies.

Understanding the total cost of each batch helps proactively plan for producing other similar “A” grade items. The Production Planner cares less about cost and more about capacity roadblocks. They want to know how additional material and resource requirements could lead to unplanned downtimes.

Warehouse operators need to record consumption. Their figures are based on when Quality Control (QC) tells them to proceed with the job, how much to consume on the batch and how many hours were already recorded. CEOs want to know if the operators have systems and processes in place to capture critical data in real-time.

Many equipment operators tend not to record data during operations, waiting instead till the end of the production run to capture any data.

Production managers constantly look for ways to substitute materials to meet timelines, quality standards and batch potency, all while following existing company rules. At the same time, they need to accurately record batch data. Using Internet of Things (IoT) sensors that capture this data as it occurs in real-time and feed it directly into the ERP system provides this accurate, continuous data flow.

Batch Manufacturing – An Example

Some long-running batch manufacturing processes require hourly quality control tests. Depending on the PH values and other data, operators add chemicals and make other changes to achieve the desired results. From a cost accounting perspective, the quantity of materials consumed from inventory may not be recorded. This causes inventory records to become out of sync and inaccurate. Not knowing what and how much is used may cause a controller to categorize these additions as overhead costs.

Some practical solutions to ensure materials added during ongoing production testing are accurately recorded include:

  • Having an industrial grade tablet or mobile device on the shopfloor to aid in data capture. Products and quantities are captured when operators have the time to input them.
  • A more accurate method uses IoT sensors that tracks starts, stops and inputs within each tank. IoT sensors can also generate an alarm when deviations occur.
  • Barcode readers and scanners are also helpful in capturing product use data on the shopfloor, and can be easy to operate.
  • Training staff on simple new production processes helps ensure every team is performing the right task at the right time.

Tracking electronic signatures helps ensure the right people are performing each process and can help prevent incorrect practices.

High-Level Production Process

High-Level Production Process

Standard Cost Calculation

How are standard costs determined in a sophisticated mixed-mode manufacturing ERP system, where process manufacturing and discrete processes occur within the same operation facility? These costs are derived from standards set on the formula or build of materials (BOM) depending on a combination of the:

  • Batch being manufactured
  • Contents of each container
  • Hours spent on each operation
  • Standard resource costs per unit price

The calculated cost of materials using a formula or a BOM is derived from individual raw materials or intermediate costs. The cost of operations comes from resources and machines assigned to the task.

Past history helps set accurate standards to proactively manage production runs and accurately record production costs.

C-level executives tracking profitability and plant managers whose bonuses depend on higher margins are constantly looking to reduce redundant spending caused by operational and resource inefficiencies.

Figure: 2Standard Costing Formula

Standard Cost Calculation

Standard Cost Calculation Results

What Should Happen When Estimating Production Costs

The first step in estimating production costs is planning the size of each batch. Your ERP system should automatically scale from the standard batch size and identify the standard cost. Using the ERP data provides an insight on other decisions about the batch such as identifying the right margin and setting an appropriate selling price. These figures can appear on customer quotes and sales orders.

As production jobs are released to the production floor, operators allocate all appropriate raw materials for consumption. When this happens, a good inventory tracking system such as that in Microsoft Dynamics 365, marks those specific raw material lots as unavailable for other batches.

Allocating raw material lots and resources correctly and timely recording data in a modern Pharmaceutical ERP has benefits. They include controlling unnecessary mistakes and coverups, providing a true picture of product costs.

Standard Cost Rollup

The standard cost rollup for a manufactured product is made up of direct material, direct labor, overhead and indirect costs.

Following actual raw material consumption, there is a tendency to not record point-in-time information for fear of making mistakes or making errors while not tracking what was altered from standards and causing a variance.

The Consumption Process

During raw material consumption, physical inventory is relieved by directly booking material costs to Work-In-Process (WIP). If we were to assume that the only changes on a production run is to the overall labor and machine time on operations, then all standards relieved from WIP would book production and quantity variances based on standard.

raw material consumption Process

Using a Multi-Tier Formula or BOM

A more complicated scenario occurs when there is a multi-tier formula. The production produces intermediate products that are then used in the next tier. Additional raw materials are added. This process continues until the product is finished, in some situations, yields are tallied before moving to the next step.

In others, the shop floor goes by standards, recording adjustments to materials and operations after the final finished lot is produced. In this scenario, all tiers in the multi-tiered process are only closed at the end. This process can cause a complicated cost calculation considering all the elements involved plus any variances.

Multi-Tier Formula or BOM for Production Process

Key Takeaways

With proper record keeping and accounting methods, it’s possible to streamline operations and reduce or eliminate unpredictable variances. If you’re not sure where to start, these three steps will help.

  1. 1.Examine your current manufacturing practices and calculate their downstream impact on costing.
  2. 2.Understand how competitors outperforming the market are becoming more efficient.
  3. 3.Identify different methods to improve both productivity and worker efficiency.

Organizations can take advantage of ERPs like Microsoft Dynamics 365 to help pinpoint areas for improvement and focus on company goals. It includes production cost buckets including quantity, substitution and lot variances.

Contact Xcelpros to learn more. Xcelpros loves to show customers how they stand to benefit from the sophisticated analytics and business intelligence tools embedded within D365’s Finance and Supply Chain Management systems. These tools provide the necessary insights to grow and stay ahead of the market.

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References: Pharmaceutical manufacturing market