The client is a Pharmaceutical Company authorized by the Italian government to produce more than 100 APIs of various therapeutic classes. It has a GMP capacity that positions it as No. 1 in Italy and one of the leaders in Europe in the production of active ingredients for the pharmaceutical industry, with 1.750 highly specialized personnel across three different production sites and commercial offices all around the world.

The client is trying to emerge in a very regulated business environment and has asked for help in dealing with increasing complexity in production processes to avoid the risk of having its business killed. Tons of different, custom production processes and equipment resources makes production planning and asset management a nightmare, and this complexity is not well managed by existing tools. As a consequence, equipment resources utilization and service levels (OTIF) are unsatisfactory, and stocks are accumulating well above the needs.

This resulted in five company’s goals to be achieved through our intervention:

• to receive an immediate support to manage the complexity in planning;
• to improve service level and equipment utilization by better scheduling of production resources;
• to improve efficiency in production planning operations that are now performed manually;
• to identify the main gaps and define a set of quick-wins to improve the overall master data quality;
• to support the improvement initiatives in the medium and long term.

We have performed an in-depth analysis of the production planning processes, interviewing company’s experts and boiling down to the most granular level of detail possible. At the same time we have inspected the existing IT systems and databases, identifying the main gaps and focusing on how to improve data models to better represent the planning processes.

Subsequently we have designed and implemented a new digital tool for production planning, aimed to enhance planning operations and to be integrated with the existing systems (ERP/MRP) and S&OP cycle.

Leveraging on Artificial Intelligence algorithms, our tool allows to automatically schedule production plans on a 24-month horizon, finding optimal plans and alternative scenarios is a matter of minutes, and leading to improved saturation and service level while decreasing WIP stock at the same time.

After confirming the validity of the tool, we have eventually planned a set of initiatives to ease and improve data management, and to support the adoption of the new tool in all the plants.