SIMCAP® and Capacity Management in the Pharmaceutical & Biopharmaceutical Industries
|
As the pharma (and now the biopharma) industries seek to drive the cost of manufacturing operations down more and more companies are seeking to implement Lean Principles. The basic fundamentals of Lean Principles (Lean Manufacturing) is to
By eliminating waste we mean the removal of as many non value adding activities from the organisations operations as possible. It is not always possible to remove all of these but it is possible to remove many of them and to minimise the remainder. By maintaining flow we mean the driving of product from delivery of raw materials through the manufacturing process to shipment to the customer. This means that there is a high product velocity or throughput through the plant with little work in progress or inventory of product maintained. While the elimination of non value adding activities brings a continuous improvement philosophy to an organisation that sustains the desire to succeed and improve it is the increase in flow that has the biggest benefit in the pharma industry. The reason for this is that most pharma companies have high historical levels of inventory on site and this accounts for a huge amount of working capital typed up and locked away. One of the key factors in organising flow in your organisation is understanding the capability of your manufacturing operations and ensuring that the capacity of all workcentres is linked so that materials and product can flow from one workcentre to another with building work in progress (stoppage in flow) and without causing workcentres to be idle (waste of resources). The key to achieving this is Capacity Management What is Capacity Management?
Capacity Management
is the process
of reviewing and assessing your workcentres capability to
produce your customer required products by ensuring that there
is sufficient capacity to eliminate bottlenecks without
generating large amounts of idle capability.
It is a fine balance of providing enough effective capacity without incurring additional costs of additional capability when it is not required GPN's sister company Profile Solutions Ltd. has developed a simple tool to help companies rapidly review and assess their capacity model called SIMCAP®. SIMCAP® is designed as a process oriented application that follows an intuitive process for allowing factory managers and planner to review and understand their capacity model. It helps them understand their ERP set up better by providing a profile and modelling capability for the key variables in capacity management without impacting on the stability of the master production schedule. Once management have balanced the load in the bottleneck workcentres and made sure that they have not simply moved it to another centre they can simply print out the changes required to optimise delivery of product. To view some brief demonstrations of it's capability simply click here |
Key Features of SIMCAP®: Standard ERP download Visual tracking of key planning parameters Scenario planning and simulation on key operational variables Real time modelling of data
Capacity assessment and profiling of non-product, non-ERP items that consume capacity Workcentre specific calendars Ability to manage automated and manual operations Full auditing and tracking of changes during profiling
|
|
|
|
For more information about Capacity management and Supply Operations Improvements contact info@globalpharmanetworks.com and for more information on SIMCAP® contact SIMCAP@profile-sol.com |
|||
