New collaborative project aims to generate 3% productivity boost at Australian pharmaceutical sites

META, a collaborative network of high potential manufacturing businesses and researchers, has today announced a collaborative project between Hospira, GlaxoSmithKline and CSL to generate a targeted 3% productivity boost with an estimated return on investment of up to $2.4M dollars at Australian pharmaceutical sites.

Led by pharmaceutical giants GlaxoSmithKline, a consortium of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies including Hospira and CSL, have assembled to benefit from the business optimisation expertise of research partner, University of Melbourne.

“This is META’s first productivity focused manufacturing project identified by the pharmaceutical industry, to ensure benefits from the supply-chain optimisation expertise can be leveraged to deliver major productivity improvements across a number of Australian pharmaceutical sites” says Zoran Angelkovski, Managing Director of META.

“The unique part of the project is the methodology will be shared amongst multiple pharmaceutical companies to create an exponential benefit for the industry” adds Mr Angelkovski.

Hospira’s Mulgrave site in Victoria, is the first location to engage in the project, which will ultimately achieve increases in cost competitiveness and optimisation of their site manufacturing processes.

“The META Biopharma best practice project will implement a full review of our manufacturing process, building up valuable knowledge and performance results relating to material flow, equipment and effective people resource utilisation” says Andrew Hodder, Vice President of Operations from Hospira Mulgrave.

“It’s a real opportunity for a group of pharmaceutical companies who would ordinarily be competitors to come together and share techniques for increasing efficiency, productivity and ultimately savings.

This collaborative approach to continuous improvement is the way forward for Australian manufacturers who want to be globally competitive. We can all learn something from the way each of us operates and avoid trying to re-invent the wheel. This way we can increase our efficiency and make us more efficient, which in turn will see us being able to compete on the world market” says Philip Leslie from GlaxoSmithKline.

Research partner, the University of Melbourne plays a pivotal role in the project by providing a team of post-doctoral experts to work side by side with each company to apply world-class optimisation methods to the factory.

“University of Melbourne have had a strong academic focus on applied research and we are committed to seeing our academics work directly with industry to build strong and world-class standards to increase the productivity of Australian manufacturing sites” says Associate Professor Prakash Singh of University of Melbourne.

The project was initiated with the support of SIRFrt, who work with META to facilitate and disseminate shared learnings across the industry. The project is expected to be complete by December 2014.