Bringing intelligence to pharmaceutical production

Modern pharmaceutical plants are designed to produce multiple regulated products on multiple production lines. Traditional production scheduling tends to favour long product runs, which leads to decreased operational flexibility and increased inventory holding costs, but simplified QC and compliance costs. 

Shorter runs, however, increase flexibility, decrease inventory cost and enhance supply chain resilience. But shorter runs also increase changeover times that can reduce available capacity. These are significant constraints in pharmaceutical manufacturing, leading to lower line utilisation. So how can pharmaceutical planners improve efficiency whilst also building resilience?

Today, planners need no longer compromise. Intelligent production planning software, like Replan, matches supply chain production targets, respects operational and technical constraints (e.g. changeover and setup times), and achieves set objectives, such as maximising throughput or minimising cost.

Replan streamlines complex supply chain planning, using AI to rapidly deliver an optimal solution. It can handle the following complex scenarios:

• Multi-line planning including constraints for product groups on dedicated lines, off-loading excess production to other product lines, etc.
• Multi-level (stage) group planning. This is where there are multiple stages in production, e.g. mixing and packaging, which have different resources with different changeover implications.
• Co-production, i.e., two products that have to be made simultaneously on a production line.

A transformative technology set to redefine supply chain planning, the benefits of the Replan production planning software stretch far beyond complex scenarios. Replan can:

• Handle complex group planning calculations while your existing systems deliver core planning functionality.
• Enable fast scenarios for rapid production planning.
• Seamlessly work with any planning platform (SAP, o9, Kinaxis, Oracle, Infor).
• Go live within weeks as a SaaS solution or a fully managed service.