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 ...view middle of the document...
The plant managers and his directors support the turn around by initially changing the culture of everyone in the organization, incorporating values and behaviors.
Figure No.1
The company started to move toward the turn around with Class A, which is a continuum of operational excellence that follow through the supply chain from market demands and external suppliers to final product distribution. The main core of this process, from the resource planning perspective, was the adequate use of the enterprise resource planning system (ERP), which was being misused due to a lack of knowledge. Focused on becoming a Class A operation, the leaders were directly involved and supported the initiative engaging everyone in the organization on the required activities. The site moved from a D score to an A score in a year, just understanding and creating processes to achieve this basic concepts of operational excellence.
After starting the road to Class A, the plant leaders started to promote the right first time initiative (RFT) to start moving from good to better in efficiency and effectiveness in operations. The six sigma concepts with RFT were incorporated within a compliance model called Supply Improvement process (SIP). Business and quality metrics are monitored with governance phases, quality review councils, business review council and projects governance. All leaders in the supply chain are equally responsible for the process in charge and respond through an elevation forum to the plant director staff, senior management and CEO. The established metrics to monitor the supply chain among others are, forecast, manufacturing adherence to schedule, packaging adherence to schedule and product release, inventory weeks of supply, finance...
