Global IT & Business Change
In the pharmaceutical industry the product packaging is complex to produce and accounts for a high percentage of product recalls. This can lead to simple changes taking a long time to complete and increased range complexity leading to more product recalls. These issues can be critical for a Pharmaceutical company that needs to respond to customer demands, particularly when the cost of a recall can easily exceed a million pounds in direct costs.
For a large pharmaceutical company Pentam Programme Managed the creation of a complex IT and process infrastructure to support the establishment of a number of internationally located Service Centres for artwork, packaging and document creation. This consisted of a unique development and integration of systems to provide a web based workflow system, secure document management and a virtual problem resolution environment.
This programme had a global business change impact with the relocation of work and building understanding of the new business processes. Global support was provided through a newly created business and IT Support organization that Pentam created and initially managed. All process and systems were built, documented, tested and supported to F&DA regulated standards.
The result was to put into place one common global process for developing and changing packaging with a set of IT tools that enabled people in different locations across the world to work together quickly, efficiently and accurately. Times for specifying and enacting artwork changes reduced by 80% and no recalls due to artwork were experienced in the first three years of operation.