How to Excavate and Improve Productivity Facing the Increasingly Fierce Competition in Pharmaceutical Market?

In recent years, the number of expired patents of original research drugs has increased, the cost of product research and development has been increasing, the profit of drugs is as thin as paper under the normalization of procurement with quantity, and the competition in emerging drug market has become increasingly fierce.

These changes are more and more obvious in the pharmaceutical industry. In order to continuously obtain high economic benefits, pharmaceutical enterprises need to excavate and improve the productivity of enterprises.

However, in today's pharmaceutical manufacturing industry, the production workshops of pharmaceutical enterprises are not running in good condition, especially in pharmaceutical enterprises.

Affected by various factors, such as production mode, personnel quality, equipment maintenance, processing technology and so on, the seemingly normal equipment does not give full play to its capacity.

With the continuous development of enterprises, the production capacity of pharmaceutical enterprises is growing, Invisible also brought huge losses.

So how to excavate and improve the productivity of enterprises? The concept of OEE (comprehensive efficiency of equipment) is put forward in international manufacturing industry, that is, every production equipment has its own theoretical capacity.

To realize this theoretical capacity, it must be ensured that there is no interference and quality loss. It can measure the overall performance of the equipment, and through the calculation and analysis of OEE, the equipment can be improved and the loss and waste can be reduced.

At present, OEE has been widely used in European and American and multinational pharmaceutical enterprises. Its index has become an important standard to measure the production efficiency of enterprises, and also an important means to implement TPM (full staff production and maintenance).

But in the local pharmaceutical enterprises, OEE concept is still in the stage of being recognized, understood and tried.

And also in recent years, some pharmaceutical companies also expect to improve the overall efficiency of equipment (OEE), and improve the management level of enterprises through active layout. For example, Lunan pharmaceutical actively carried out maintenance and improvement of equipment, and put forward many reasonable improvement suggestions for "foreign equipment", and the comprehensive operation efficiency (OEE) of equipment continued to improve.

Lisheng pharmaceutical plans to plan the "14th five year plan" in the second half of 2020, including continuous cost reduction and efficiency reduction and cost control. Deepen the application of OEE and TPM, and focus on improving the utilization rate of finished products and working hours.

Kangyuan pharmaceutical industry reported in the semi annual report of 2020 that the project of intelligent solid preparation factory under construction will further improve the TPM and OEE improvement system, and form improvement mechanism through system restriction, daily monitoring, evaluation incentive and technical support to achieve the purpose of reducing cost and efficiency; Shanghai modern pharmaceutical also mentioned in the summary of semi annual report 2019 that lean management should be implemented in the reporting period to improve the quality of endogenous development.

Taking cost control as the core, focusing on site management, improving OEE, optimizing process, etc., and gradually forming lean production management system of enterprises.

Affected by the epidemic in 2020, the global pharmaceutical enterprises, including pharmaceutical enterprises, face more and more challenges in terms of cost and capacity, which forced the whole industry to transform and upgrade towards the digital direction. The industry believes that OEE is imperative in the era of big data.

It is worth mentioning that OEE of most pharmaceutical equipment is lower than average level, which also requires pharmaceutical machinery enterprises to pay attention to OEE research and provide better OEE services for pharmaceutical enterprises.

The industry points out that most of the drugs are provided to patients in the form of pills from the perspective of pharmaceutical formulations, which also means that there is a great potential to be exploited in the production of tablets.

It is reported that German tablet press enterprises are committed to optimizing the production process of pharmaceutical tablet, and bringing the production efficiency of existing tablet pressing equipment to a higher level.

For example, through the analysis of the comprehensive efficiency of the tablet pressing equipment of a pharmaceutical enterprise, it has checked the use, maintenance process, technical training of the operator and the process of tablet pressing, After listening to its suggestions, the company has made some technical transformation through investment.

Tablets by tablet press machine

The productivity of tablet press machines have been increased to 320000 tablets per hour comparing with the original 180000,and the production time is shortened to 816h every year, and the production cost has been reduced by more than 160000 euros, which has brought benefits to the enterprise.

In general, pharmaceutical enterprises need to understand and learn the concept of OEE, analyze the reasons influencing OEE in time, improve the production efficiency of enterprises, make them obtain sustained and high economic benefits, dig and improve the productivity of enterprises more greatly, and ensure that enterprises are not competing in the fierce market competition.