In the part three of this blog series, I discussed some pitfalls to consider if using the commercial artwork process as a base-on for the clinical trials artwork process, and how it is essential to understand these sensitivities to ensure a suitable capability is provided.

In this, the final post in the series, I will discuss the activities required to develop your clinical trials artwork process.

The first step we would suggest is a thorough capture of the current (as-is) processes and activities involved in the creation of existing clinical trials artworks. This should include all required scenarios and process variations for different products, suppliers, geographies or any other changeable parameters.

Once the as-is process has been determined, the status of relevant supporting capabilities should be considered. This should include, but is not limited to, how the process is controlled, how workload is forecast and projects planned, how people are organised and service providers managed, how performance is monitored and governed, and how are supporting systems provided and operated. This will indicate the level of maturity for each capability.

The final step of the as-is analysis is the commercial artwork process, again mapping the end-to-end process and any variants and determining the status of supporting capabilities. When pulled together these assessments should provide a comprehensive picture of the as-is situation for both the clinical trials and commercial artwork processes.

Moving on to develop the future (to-be) design, the first step would be to determine the output requirements and success criteria for the clinical trials artwork process – what does the process need to deliver to meet the requirements of your business? How is this going to be measured and how will you assure success? From there, we would suggest you consider the key decision gates that are required along the process. Referring back to the second post in this series, this may be similar to:

High level process step
1. Define the text required
2. Define the change required
3. Create the artwork
4. Approve the printer proof (if required)
5. Implement the change

Decision gate outcome
1. An approved text
2. An approved change or brief
3. An approved artwork
4. An approved printer proof (if required)
5. A final packaging component available

These five steps illustrate the summary high level (level 1) process design. From there, each process step should be further divided into sub-steps at an activity (level 2) and then task (level 3) level. This gives the detail of each step required to meet the requirements of the decision gate. Inputs and outputs, roles and responsibilities, information flows, key features and documentation requirements can then be described for each step.

Once the process has been described in detail, the to-be requirements for the underpinning capabilities can be defined. It is important to then test the design against defined scenarios and through design reviews with key stakeholders to ensure an appropriate and all-encompassing proposal has been developed.

From here the next step would be an impact of change assessment against the as-is clinical trials and commercial artwork processes and capabilities to define what changes will be required, the implications of those changes and what aspects of the commercial artwork process and capabilities can be exploited to support clinical trials artwork development. This will then permit the development of implementation plans, system user requirements and funding applications as required by the change and your company’s governance.

From the above it can be seen that the development of a clinical trials artwork process follows a methodical path utilising standard process design methodologies. It is important that this activity is undertaken with all of the required knowledge and input from the various parties within and outside your organisation who participate in the process, and the design considers future business requirements as well as meeting today’s challenges.

This concludes this series of blog posts on this topic. I hope you have found the content useful. If you require any help, advice or assistance with any aspect of your finished good supply chain process, please get in touch with us at Be4ward.

Should you have any questions about this or any of my other blogs, if you would like to discuss the artwork processes within your company or would simply like to request a copy of my booklets, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly on my email [email protected]

In part 2 of my blog series, I discussed some key considerations in using the commercial artwork process as a base-on for the clinical trials artwork process. In doing this, it is essential to understand the differences required as there isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ process, but there are enough similarities to permit some leveraging of tools and capabilities. However, in developing a clinical trials artwork capability, particularly when exploiting aspects of the commercial artwork tools and capabilities, there are a number of pitfalls to be aware of and avoid.

The first pitfall to consider is the design of the packaging artwork. Commercial artwork includes graphic design for brand logos etc. whereas clinical trials artwork tends to be a simpler artwork design with a very plain box. It is important that artwork operators appreciate the reasons for the differences.

The second pitfall concerns the process rigor inherent in the commercial artwork process. As discussed before, this can bring benefit in increased accuracy and repeatability, but can often be at the cost of speed and flexibility. It is important to ensure that the process performance requirements are clear, designed-in and achievable, particularly with the required change volume and turnaround speed. These differences will likely require slightly different workflows designed into your processes and IT systems which will require management. Introducing change to these workflows will be more complex in the highly controlled environment required for the commercial artwork process. It is therefore important to ensure that the appropriate mechanisms for process lifecycle management are clearly defined and capable of maintaining the required levels of process effectiveness and compliance.

In some cases it may be most appropriate, where sharing IT tools with the commercial artwork process, to create the clinical trials artwork process in an independent instance of the IT tool. This will depend on the design requirements of the artwork processes, the functionality of the tools and the infrastructure design.

The next pitfall to consider is where on-line printing is being used, as the artwork may have to be specifically laid out to suit the requirements of the printer by the artwork operator and held in different file formats. Furthermore, it may be necessary to interface to the on-line systems to transfer the print files.

Management of required workload is the next pitfall to consider. The visibility of required artwork change volumes in the commercial artwork process is always a difficulty, but in clinical trials this is even more acute. It is therefore essential that sufficient capacity is available in all impacted teams, to process the volume of changes required. There is an added degree of complexity where teams are shared between the commercial and clinical trials artwork processes, as capacity will be required for both and appropriate prioritisation and dispute resolution processes will be needed. This is further compounded where external service providers are used and service level agreements must reflect the performance requirements of both processes.

Performance requirements raise another pitfall to consider as the performance requirements of the commercial and clinical trials artwork processes will likely be similar but subtly different. It is therefore essential that the defined KPIs and targets reflect the requirements of each process.

The organisational scope of the clinical trials artwork process introduces the final two pitfalls to consider.

Firstly, the process will involve new groups and people independent to the commercial artwork process, both inside and outside of your company. The requirements for education and training, IT system access, competency assessment and ongoing refresher training and updates all bring a maintenance overhead and cost.

Secondly the involvement of these groups will require changes to governance and leadership to ensure these new parties are appropriately represented in decision making and issue resolution.

From the above it can be seen that there are pitfalls to consider if using the commercial artwork process as a base-on for the clinical trials artwork process, and it is essential to understand these sensitivities to ensure a suitable capability is provided.

In my next post in this series, I will discuss how to develop your clinical trials artwork process.

Should you have any questions about this or any of my other blogs, if you would like to discuss the artwork processes within your company or would simply like to request a copy of my booklets, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly on my email [email protected]

In part 1 of this blog series, I discussed some key considerations in the development of an artwork process to support clinical trials. The clinical trials artwork process needs to deliver accurate and repeatable artwork in a fast changing and dynamic environment. The need for both rigour and flexibility provides challenging requirements for the process.

A clinical trials labeling capability is often developed in isolation, however most pharmaceutical companies have a complementary process and associated capabilities for managing commercial artwork for marketed products. There are opportunities to leverage aspects of this commercial process and capabilities in the development of the process and capabilities for clinical trials.

Firstly, considering the design of the clinical trials artwork process, where the company has developed an end-to-end commercial artwork process, this can be used as a base-on for the design of the clinical trials artwork process. At a high level, the basic steps and outcomes from associated decision gates are similar:

High level process step
1. Define the text required
2. Define the change required
3. Create the artwork
4. Approve the printer proof (if required)
5. Implement the change

Decision gate outcome
1. An approved text
2. An approved change or brief
3. An approved artwork
4. An approved printer proof (if required)
5. A final packaging component available

An effective commercial artwork process brings benefits in terms of rigour, data management and version control, however in the detail there are a number of things that would need to be considered in order to adapt it for clinical trials:

• Is the format of the text provided specific to clinical trials (rather than the Company Core Datasheet or approved regulatory text) and sourced from different teams?
• The clinical trials process may not be covered by the company change control process so approval requirements may differ. If so, how would the requirements for the change be communicated and could existing briefing documents be used?
• How are clinical trial packaging component numbers managed?
• Where local or on-line printing of components is undertaken, is there a requirement for a printer proof? If some printed components are purchased and a printer proof required, how is that process variant incorporated?
• How is the final component inspected before use?
• Who are the approvers of the text, the change, the artwork and the components?

The likely outcome is a set of specific clinical trials workflows to execute the various clinical trial artwork process scenarios that are similar, but not identical, to the commercial artwork workflows.

Beyond the process, there are also opportunities to exploit the IT capabilities underpinning the commercial artwork process:
• Data management, workflow and performance management tools can all be used to support the clinical trials workflows providing higher levels of control, secure communication and effective document control and version management. However it needs to be remembered that moving into a more controlled and rigorous environment can impact flexibility.
• Specialist tools for artwork creation, proof-reading and component verification can also be beneficial, providing company standards solutions and automating manual tasks. Any tool used needs to be compatible with the file formats required for any local or on-line printing.
• Portals provided for communication with external partners allow secure communication to clinical trials partners.

In all cases the benefits of the use of IT tools in providing more control need to be considered against the restrictions, maintenance and user change involved in operating in such an environment.

From the above it can be seen that there are benefits in using the commercial artwork process as a base-on for the clinical trials artwork process, but it is essential to understand the differences required and design the processes and supporting tools to ensure these differences are catered for. There isn’t a ‘one size fits all’, but there are enough similarities to permit some leveraging of tools and capabilities.

In my next post I will discuss some of the pitfalls to avoid in developing your clinical trials artwork process.

Should you have any questions about this or any of my other blogs, if you would like to discuss the artwork processes within your company or would simply like to request a copy of my booklets, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly on my email [email protected]

As pressure to deliver new products intensifies in an increasingly complex regulatory environment, clinical trials are a vital endeavour for the pharmaceutical company. If things go well, it will mean approval of the drug and potential revenue for the company. However even slight errors have the potential to cause delays in the trial, wasting time and resources. Significant errors could lead to more scrutiny of the drug, with the potential for stopping the trial and preventing the drug from reaching the market. Therefore the design of effective clinical trials and their underpinning processes, is essential to ensuring the satisfactory execution of those trials.

In this blog series I will examine four important considerations in the clinical trials artwork process, starting with the importance of artwork management as one of the required underpinning processes for a clinical trial.

There are a number of criteria that this process must deliver to support a successful trial:

•In the clinical trial, information will be constantly changing as the trial evolves. This will be driven by numerous internal and external factors, for example feedback from the trial, the company’s target labelling outcomes and opinion from external regulators. Therefore the artwork process needs to be sufficiently flexible to cater for this volume of change.

•The timescales involved in clinical trials are typically compressed and thus the expected lead-times for process steps are constrained.

•The working environment for clinical trials is typically a project type environment with a dynamic feel and high dependency on other activities.

•Volumes for clinical trials can be small and often supplied using local or online printing capabilities. The artwork process can therefore require the supply of artwork files in formats other than traditional PDF, requiring specific additional features to support the local printing technology.

•As well as using the active product and placebo for trials, comparative studies against other marketed products from other companies can be undertaken. This requires repackaging or over-labelling and can drive a significant range of required artwork profiles.

•The range of suppliers involved in the trial such as contract clinical trials providers, internal or contract packaging facilities and packaging component suppliers, creates a complex network of internal and external stakeholders who all need to be integrated into the artwork change process.

•Through execution of the trial, the product safety profile and instructions for use are being detailed and defined. This has significant impact on the final commercial product, so the artwork process needs to support effective decision making from relevant impacted stakeholders.

•Finally, the process must ensure accurate and repeatable artwork is provided to support a successful trial.

The artwork process is just one of the underpinning processes for clinical trials. The criteria above define some of the important considerations to be incorporated in the design of an effective clinical trials artwork process and meeting these will help facilitate successful trials.

In my next post, I will discuss what opportunities exist to leverage the commercial artwork process to support artwork for clinical trials.

Should you have any questions about this or any of my other blogs, if you would like to discuss the artwork processes within your company or would simply like to request a copy of my booklets, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly on my email [email protected]

Throughout this blog series, I’ve been looking at how to optimise your packaging facility by balancing the product portfolio against packaging facilities. Optimisation is necessary and desirable as without it pharmaceutical packaging operations can be expensive, with non-optimal service levels, inflexibility and poor utilisation.

A balance can be found by addressing three key issues:

1- Ensure your product portfolio is appropriate

Product portfolios are becoming increasingly complex for many reasons. The following factors contribute to increasing portfolio complexity:

- The need to maximise value from current assets

- New products emerging for complex medical conditions

- Local market requirements

- Commercial advantage

Ensuring your portfolio is suitable for your packaging facility is key to achieving optimisation. These are my top tips to help ensure your product portfolio is appropriate for your facilities:

Tip 1: Understand the product/therapy strategy and value of complexity

Tip 2: Understand the portfolio, volumes and lifecycle of SKUs

Tip 3: Have clear approval and control processes for portfolio changes

Tip 4: Prune the portfolio regularly

Tip 5: Share components or packs

2 – Optimise your packaging facility design

Packaging facility equipment needs assessing right down to component level. Is the line spec suited to the product requirements? Is the facility suitably laid-out? How effective are the supporting business processes?

These are my top tips to help optimise the facility design, delivering optimal service levels at minimal cost:

Tip 6: Plan for runners, repeaters and strangers

Tip 7: Manage order quantities of components and finished packs

Tip 8: Utilise postponement

Tip 9: Utilise late customisation

Tip 10: Build flexibility into packaging equipment

Tip 11: Reduce line changeover time

Tip 12: Optimise supply chain design and hubs

Tip 13: Outsource where appropriate

3 – Ensure your product packaging is designed to meet the needs of the optimised product portfolio and packaging facility

Product packaging must be easy to use, meet regulatory requirements, protect the product and be robust for shipping operations. Packaging engineers and artwork designers need to consider the overall packaging supply system when developing their designs. These are my top tips to ensure the key attributes of the product packaging enables the most appropriate packaging solutions to be used:

Tip 14: Control brand variation

Tip 15: Control platform sizes

Tip 16: Standardise artwork templates and layouts

Tip 17: Minimise fonts, illustrations and graphical elements

Tip 18: Revisit existing packaging designs

Tip 19: Plan for future legislation

In conclusion, complexity is an underlying cause of inefficiency in packaging operations. Some complexity may be considered ‘good’ because it presents value as financial return from sale of the product. The key is to learn how to cope efficiently with this ‘good complexity’ whilst developing methods to control the other type of complexity – the ‘bad complexity’. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any ‘golden bullet’ that will help you to do this easily. Rather, there are a series of techniques that can be applied across the operation to manage the complexity and optimise your operations.

Should you have any questions about this or any of my other blogs, if you would like to discuss the packaging complexities within your company or would simply like to request a copy of my booklets, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly on my email [email protected]

In this blog series I’m looking at the, often very necessary, issues of product packaging complexity and how these can be addressed via appropriate product portfolio, examining the packaging facility design and looking at the key attributes of product packaging. In part four, I offered my top tips on optimising the packaging facility. Here in part five, I will be exploring the topic of product packaging, offering my top tips on standardising brand, component sizes and templates and the importance of looking ahead and planning for future legislation.

Tip 14: Control brand variation

Do you have a process to control the brand image and prevent unnecessary or undesirable proliferation of brand designs?

It is not uncommon for companies to have a range of brand images that have arisen historically:

• Locally generated brand names and brand images.

• Response to local market regulations requiring unique local naming or branding.

• Legacy brand images from acquired companies who once marketed the product in a specific country.

• 2nd brands or co-marketed products.

If standard brand images and packaging artwork designs can be maintained, it presents the opportunity to take a template approach to artwork, improving efficiency and reducing risk or error. This is discussed further in Tip 16. Many companies now exercise strict control over brand images and packaging designs at a global or regional level, to ensure they present a common identity to consumers. It is extremely difficult to rationalise brand images after the event, due to regulatory constraint and consumer resistance and therefore clearly defined and mandated brand guidelines are an important tool in controlling brand variation up front.

Tip 15: Control platform sizes

Do you define and maintain a set of standard platform sizes?

Components can come in multiple sizes and shapes and the challenge is how these can be controlled to an optimum number. Your approach to this will be heavily impacted by your supply chain design.

• If you have a few global or regional factories, rationalisation can be targeted at a local level.

• If you have a high number of factories supplying multiple dose forms to many markets, you will be presented with a significant number of inter-dependencies making rationalisation more challenging.

• If you purchase finished products from third parties, you may be restricted to each supplier’s standards.

Many companies will have combinations of all of the above, so your approach may be global, regional or by product/supply chain. For printed packaging components, the challenge is to reduce the range down to the smallest practical number of profiles. This gives less profiles to manage and will aid line change-overs. It is also a pre-requisite for most types of late customisation. Platform sizes are normally driven by the size of primary components and so it is often best to start with a rationalisation of primary component sizes and shapes to reach an optimum range of platforms. For other components, such as spoons and measuring cups, try to rationalise to the minimum number of variants.

Tip 16: Standardise artwork templates and layouts

Are there standard templates and layouts for artworks?

Standardising the brand image, packaging artwork design and component sizes, permits the use of standard artwork templates and layouts. In this approach, global or regional templates can be created including all the standard design content. Areas for specific market or regional content can be provided on the artwork and these can be populated when specific local variants are required, either creating market specific artworks or as part of an on-line printing activity with semi-finished components. This saves having to create a completely new artwork every time, which has obvious compliance benefits. It also ensures that areas such as overprint areas are always in the correct locations. Furthermore, it facilitates using tools to automatically add content to the template and automatically create the artwork.

Tip 17: Minimise fonts, illustrations and graphical elements

Are there defined standard fonts, illustrations, and graphical elements?

Artwork content such as fonts, illustrations and other graphical content can provide hidden sources of complexity. It is common for companies to build large ranges of content that need to be stored, maintained and updated. Proliferation of fonts may not seem significant, but licenses need to be managed and fonts need to be assured to ensure accurate replication across different platforms and machines. It also results in dilution of the brand image. To control fonts, a defined house style set of fonts should be mandated within the corporate and brand guidelines with clear processes for the introduction of new fonts. Similarly, illustrations and graphical elements should be held in controlled libraries with standard images for particular uses.

Tip 18: Packaging design

Have you designed your packaging to maximise the opportunities to deal with complexity?

All of the different techniques we have discussed in these tips offer opportunities for dealing with low volume products and managing complexity, but they may not be feasible with your existing packaging designs. It may therefore be necessary to revisit some of the structural or artwork elements of the design to exploit specific techniques. These can include:

• Changing component artwork to make it standard across multiple countries (or even removing all market specific information).

• Grouping all market specific information on certain areas of the artwork (like the EU blue box concept).

• Providing space on components and artwork for on-line printing requirements or application of labels.

• Reducing colours to make on-line printing easier.

• Changing component size to provide more printing space.

• Providing pockets or flaps on cartons for attaching leaflets and booklets.

• Standardising sizes, platforms, layouts and templates.

• Using colour coding, poka-yoke and pharmacodes or data matrix codes to aid control of assembly operations.

It is therefore important to ensure that a holistic approach to packaging design is taken, ensuring effective design for manufacture.

Tip 19: Plan for future legislation

Are you already planning for how you will introduce required future legislation?

No matter how well you manage your current portfolio, there will always be new challenges to drive further complexity. New aspects of legislation will arise, requiring new solutions to provide. At the time of writing these included:

• QR codes

• Serialisation

• Tamper evidence

• Temperature monitoring

It is therefore worthwhile planning ahead for future legislative drivers and considering:

• How well are you sensing what is likely to happen in the future?

• What changes do you want to influence and how are you engaged in that influencing?

• How early do you mobilise to start introducing new capabilities?

• What alliances and partnerships do you need to establish to develop new solutions and supply strategies?

• How do you integrate necessary changes into normal business to avoid the incremental workload?

• How do you ensure packaging design activities are cognisant of potential future requirements?

• How do you track progress to ensure compliance is achieved?

In the next and final part of this blog series, I’ll be pulling together our learnings on packaging complexity and examining the different types of complexity.

Should you have any questions about this or any of my other blogs, if you would like to discuss the packaging complexities within your company or would simply like to request a copy of my booklets, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly on my email [email protected]

In this blog series I’m looking at the, often very necessary, issues of product packaging complexity and how these can be addressed via appropriate product portfolio, optimising the packaging facility design and examining key attributes of product packaging.

In part three I offered my top tips on what should be considered to drive maximum value out of your packaging portfolio. Here in part four I examine the packaging facility and offer my top tips on optimising the facility design to deliver optimal service levels at minimum cost.

Tip 6: Plan for runners, repeaters and strangers

Do you have capability to supply product with different order and volume profiles – runners, repeaters and strangers?

Products can be classified into three groupings:

Runners: products that are produced very regularly.

Repeaters: products that are produced or packed frequently, but not every week or month.

Strangers: products that are produced very infrequently.

The concept of runners, repeaters and strangers provides an excellent method for production scheduling and supply chain management. Runners typically provide the bulk of the stable packaging volume permitting high line run times and often dedicated equipment. Repeaters don’t justify dedicated equipment but occur frequently enough to allow scheduling with runners and are still packaged in reasonable batch sizes. Strangers present a greater challenge as their infrequent nature and small overall volume make them challenging to build into the production schedule, produce in economic batch sizes and manage component supplies. Supply sites will normally have to produce products for all three groupings, and increasingly an individual brand can have all three types of product. It is therefore necessary to have the capability to schedule and pack all three. The application of many of the techniques presented in this blog to minimise variation, increase pack or component sharing, or introduce postponement or late customisation techniques, can assist in managing the disruption created.

Tip 7: Manage order quantities of components and finished packs

Have you got processes to effectively manage order quantities of components and finished packs?

Considering the previous tip on runners, repeaters and strangers, it is important to consider how volumes of components and finished products are managed through the supply chain. Packaging operations are under high degrees of pressure to maximise efficiency. Where high volume runner products are present it is easy to produce in economic batch sizes and purchase commercially advantageous volumes of components. However with stranger products, the preferred packaging batch sizes can often result in high levels of inventory of finished packs which are at risk of obsolescence through shelf life expiry. Often this results in repackaging activity to move product from one market to another prior to expiry. In addition, the economic order quantities of packaging components can often result in high stock levels of components that have to be written off when a pack change is required. It is therefore important to manage two dynamics to minimise the risk of obsolescence:

1. Maximise the order volumes through pack or component sharing or postponement or late customisation techniques to increase stock turns.

2. Consider the whole activity cost in setting economic batch and order sizes and thus reduce the batch and order volumes.

Tip 8: Postponement

Can you postpone customisation to as late as possible in the supply chain?

There are a number of definitions of postponement, but the one we will use here is the delaying of customisation of a product until as late as possible in the packaging operation. There are many examples of this:

• Filing blank bottles or cans for stock and labelling when fulfilling a specific order.

• BIB/BOB (blisters in boxes, blisters out of boxes) e.g. producing standard blisters for stock and packing into cartons at a later stage to create market specific packs.

• Assembling different combinations of standard components to create a unique pack variant for a specific market.

In all cases it can be seen that the goal is to keep the product as standard as possible for as far through the packaging operation, and then only make it market specific at the latest possible operation, perhaps against a specific market order.

This can present a number of challenges for most operations:

• Additional quality system control to manage intermediate handling and subsequent further packaging operations.

• With fill and pack lines it can be necessary to remove the product part way through the operation and then run it down the line again at a later time to complete the packaging.

• Hand packing can be required for the final assembly of small batches.

• The design and characteristics of some products and components makes it very difficult to avoid making market specific until late in the process.

Tip 9: Late customisation

Can you late customise components and products?

Our definition of ‘late customisation’ is the physical modification of standard components and products to add features or information, making them product or market specific. Examples would include on-line printing of content and over-labelling and may be undertaken downstream of the packaging facility.

On-line component printing is becoming increasingly common but depends upon the type of component and information required:

• On-line printing of foils and labels is often undertaken, particularly if only requiring black ink.

• Equipment for near-line short-order printing of leaflets and booklets is becoming available.

• On-line printing of multi-colour cartons (particularly pre-glued) is more complex with fewer examples, although digital presses are increasingly used at print suppliers for short runs. Over-labelling can vary between simple printed labels (pharmacy labels) to complex labels (e.g. including sealed pouches for leaflets).

A few considerations with late customisation and over-labelling:

• How do you assure the quality of print for all components? A missing decimal point could have significant consequences.

• How do you ensure the line speeds are not significantly impacted? Is near-line printing a better option?

• Do on-line printing machines require different artwork files or formats? Where are these files stored and how does that impact your artwork process and system uptime?

• Can your MRP system provide the necessary breakdown of SKUs and components?

Tip 10: Build flexibility into packaging equipment

Have you got the right type of packaging equipment that provides suitable levels of flexibility?

It is often tempting when specifying equipment to specify the fastest packaging lines. Indeed, due to being pressured for ever increasing levels of efficiency, most packaging operations would love to be producing high volumes of few variants as fast as possible. However, as we have discussed, the healthcare marketplace is increasingly not like that, as volumes are decreasing and complexity is increasing. It is therefore important when specifying packaging equipment to ensure that the correct criteria for how the portfolio needs to be supplied are defined and agreed. Trends are driving this towards much more flexible machinery that can be easily changed for different pack formats, with the ability to insert specific modules when required (e.g. serialisation printing modules), or the ability to split fill and pack lines to permit part packing. Due to the capital costs required, it is unlikely to be feasible to reequip packaging facilities at a later date. Therefore, making the right choice of equipment to support your expected portfolio and supply strategies is a critical strategic decision.

Tip 11: Reduce line changeover time

Have you maximised your opportunities for fast changeover?

Line changeovers are non-productive time and in a world of increasing complexity and product variants, the amount of changeovers increases and so lines can spend significant amounts of time not producing product. This reduces capacity and increases cost. There are three parts to a changeover; clean-down, set-up and startup, and all can be improved through the application of operational excellence techniques and product and equipment design. There are four steps to consider and many opportunities with each:

Eliminate non-essential operations: for example standardise component sizes, reduce the range of tooling, equipment modifications like adjusting only one guard rail instead of two.

Perform external setup: for example have all of the changeover materials and equipment ready before you start, use pre-assembled modules.

Simplify internal set up: for example use quick couplings, scribe marks, jigs, hand knobs rather than nuts and bolts.

Measure and improve: continue to look for opportunities, hone your process and keep training. A changeover should be like a racing car pit stop.

Tip 12: Supply chain design and hubs

Have you optimised your supply chain to provide required levels of variation and customisation?

In coping with complexity, it is necessary to think not just of what must be done and how, but also where. To minimise obsolescence the goal should be to make products and components market specific as late in the supply chain as possible. To achieve this, a different approach to the design of the supply chain may be required. Postponement and late customisation activities are production activities and therefore must be undertaken with appropriate GMP processes and facilities. You therefore need to ensure that such operations are being undertaken with appropriate levels of control and therefore undertaking such tasks within warehouse operations may not be appropriate. Conversely, as most markets are supplied from many packaging facilities, providing the local market-specific requirements from each factory can be an unwelcome complexity burden at each factory. Ensuring that activities are undertaken at the appropriate points in the supply chain is therefore another key part of managing complexity. The concept of regional hubs can help provide appropriate solutions, where the hub supplies a group of local markets with market-specific product created from a stock of standard and customised components supplied from the factories.

Tip 13: Outsourcing

Have you considered outsourcing the things you are not best equipped to do?

Another facet of the design of your supply chain is the ‘make or buy’ decision. It may be tempting to try to keep all of the volume in house, but considering the concept of runners, repeaters and strangers, you may not be best equipped to deal with all. If you have a high-volume facility, it may be better to outsource the strangers to a packaging third party who can cope with an unpredictable product and infrequent orders. Alternatively, you may want to keep all of the specialist and unusual product in house and outsource the standard and repetitive volume. Also, considering the overall supply chain design, there may be geographic areas where you want to customise product but don’t have internal facilities available locally. An outsourced partner may be able to provide an appropriate regional hub. The important consideration is that you don’t have to do everything yourself and external partners may be better suited to solving the challenges you are faced with.

In my next post in this series, I will be exploring the topic of product packaging, offering my top tips on standardising brand, component sizes and templates and the importance of looking ahead and planning for future legislation.

Should you have any questions about this or any of my other blogs, if you would like to discuss the packaging complexities within your company or would simply like to request a copy of my booklets, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly on my email [email protected]

In this blog series I’m looking at the, often very necessary, issues of product packaging complexity and how these can be addressed via appropriate product portfolio, optimising the packaging facility design and examining key attributes of product packaging. In part two, I looked at optimisation of the packaging facility, the impact of packaging design and the consequences of mismanaged complexity. Here in part three, I will be offering some top tips on what to consider to drive maximum value out of your packaging portfolio:

Tip 1: Understand the product/therapy strategy and value of complexity

Is the commercialisation strategy for the product and therapy and the subsequent value of complexity understood?
Different products will have different requirements for the complexity of the packaging componentry and SKU portfolio. This can be driven from many factors, including but not limited to:
• Therapeutic, titration and dosing requirements
• Unmet medical needs
• Legislative requirements of the countries into which the product will be marketed
• Competitor activity and the competitive environment
• Commercialisation strategies for the product
• Market positioning and product cost profile
• Product life-cycle, line extension and patent expiry strategies
• Combination products, starter packs, special usage requirements and other opportunities to drive adherence and assist patients and healthcare providers
• Product protection, temperature and security requirements
• Local dispensing requirements

Prior to undertaking any complexity optimisation activities, it is important to understand and document these requirements to:
a) Ensure they are clearly defined and met
b) Ensure they are maintained as needed
c) Ensure appropriate control can be provided to prevent further non-essential requirements emerging

Tip 2: Understand the portfolio, volumes and life-cycle of SKUs

Is the portfolio, volumes and life-cycles of your SKUs understood?
The next step in a complexity reduction activity is a detailed understanding of the target SKU portfolio. The scope of this may be certain brands, geographic areas, supply chains or perhaps your entire company portfolio. For the chosen portfolio, you will need to understand:
• The description of each SKU – product, dose form, strength, volume.
• Where are they supplied from? Which market(s) are they supplied to? Which distribution lanes are used?
• What is the subsequent component range?
• What are the SKU volumes?
• What is the financial contribution of each SKU?

In addition, it is important to understand where each SKU is on its product life-cycle; are volumes increasing or decreasing? Typically, products go through a standard life-cycle: launch, growth, maturity, and tail off. The value of portfolio complexity often varies through this life-cycle. Therefore, it is important to understand where a product is on its life-cycle as products where the volumes are likely to increase need to be considered differently from tail products where the volumes are declining.

Tip 3: Have clear approval and control processes for portfolio changes

Do you have clear approval and control procedures for adding and removing SKUs from your portfolio?
Firstly, do you have the appropriate cross-functional governance to ensure that all relevant impacted parties are engaged in the decision making and represented appropriately at a senior level? Failure to have a balanced governance will likely result in sub-optimal decisions and low levels of buy-in. Secondly, do you have a clear set of principles endorsed by the senior governance team to manage the portfolio? These define the ‘rules of the game’ and set the criteria that decisions should be made against. Thirdly, do you have rules and processes in place for adding or deleting SKUs and components? These processes need to ensure that the decision-making hierarchy aligns with the complexity of change occurring. Processes should also include routine reviews of the portfolio (see Tip 4). Finally, do your processes ensure that the costs for change are considered in decision making and preferably charged to the groups in the organisation driving those changes? For example, charging the cost of artwork change to the originator.

Tip 4: Prune the portfolio regularly

Is there a regular process to review the portfolio and prune unnecessary or non-performing SKUs?
The performance of the portfolio is dynamic, changing due to many environmental and life-cycle factors. Therefore, a review process should ideally be performed on a routine and repeating basis to maximise the effectiveness of the portfolio. The review should be designed to categorise the portfolio. One way we would suggest is these three groupings:

Capitalise: the best performing SKUs, those contributing most of the revenue, where sales efforts should be focused to maximise return.
Control: SKUs that should be maintained in the portfolio, either because volumes are growing, but not yet providing revenue to get to the next category; volumes are in decline, but not yet critical; or they provide portfolio support to other Capitalise SKUs. These SKUs should be monitored to ensure on-going viability.
Challenge: SKUs with low volumes and/or low revenue. These SKUs should be subject to challenge to remain on the portfolio, either being discontinued, substituted or shared with other markets.

Two things to consider carefully:
• When substituting SKUs, ensure the financial benefit exceeds any potential lost sales.
• Small incremental reductions in the portfolio can have little effect on complexity at supplying sites. Savings are often only generated when lines or facilities are rationalised or eliminated.

Tip 5: Share components or packs

Are you maximising the opportunities to share components or finished packs?
Shared components and packs can provide a great opportunity to increase component and pack volumes. However, to make this happen it is necessary to identify markets and products that can successfully share components or packs. There are a number of criteria that you should consider when looking to group markets for sharing. These include geography, languages, regulatory rules, regulatory approval timelines and sale price. Choosing markets to share products needs to be considered carefully as it requires close collaboration between those markets when changes are being implemented. Therefore, it is better to have consistent groupings of markets rather than vary the sharing groups by different product. Standard market groupings also simplify the ‘where used’ assessment during the change impact assessment. A significant challenge with shared packs comes when there are different approval timelines or locally driven changes. This can result in more than one version of the shared pack being required; effectively driving you back to market specific packs.

In my next post in this series, we will look at some of my top tips for optimising the packaging facility design to deliver optimal service levels at minimum cost.

Should you have any questions about this or any of my other blogs, if you would like to discuss the packaging complexities within your company or would simply like to request a copy of my booklets, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly on my email [email protected]

In this blog series I’m looking at the, often very necessary, issues of product packaging complexity and how these can be addressed via appropriate product portfolio, optimising the packaging facility design and examining key attributes of product packaging. In part one I looked at portfolio complexity and the impact of portfolio on packaging operations. In this my latest post, I address optimisation of the packaging facility, the impact of packaging design and the consequences of mismanaged complexity.

Optimising the Packaging Facility

Often the first issue within the packaging facility can be the packaging equipment itself. Old, unreliable equipment that is slow to change over might just need to be upgraded. However, it may not be the whole line that is the issue. Packing lines consist of numerous components, each doing part of the packaging process. The overall reliability and speed of the line is a function of the reliability and speed of each component. Replacing one part may beneficially impact the overall line performance.

It is also worth considering the line specification versus the product requirements to be packed. We often see complex, high speed, automated and highly integrated packaging machinery being used for low volume short run packaging batches and can also see manual lines being used to pack larger volume SKUs. A more flexible line may be more appropriate.

Facility layout can also impact productivity. Many packaging facilities evolve over time. How is the flow of materials in your facility? Is there unnecessary handling or waiting? Where are there bottlenecks? Where are you wasting time and effort?

Finally, consider the effectiveness of business processes supporting packaging operations. Are processes optimised and efficient? Moreover, are the collective cross-functional processes tuned to work in unison or do dependencies between processes promote delays wasting time and effort?

Is the product packaging designed to meet the meet the needs of the optimised product portfolio and packaging facility?

There are many competing requirements to be considered when designing the product packaging. It must be easy to use, meet regulatory requirements, protect the product and be robust for shipping operations. It also must play its part in ensuring the most appropriate packaging solutions can be used.

Packaging techniques such as late stage customisation and postponement may have specific requirements for structural and artwork design, and these might require different solutions to those typically applied. Packaging engineers and artwork designers need to consider the overall packaging supply system when developing their designs to ensure they are fit for different solutions that may be applicable for different volume profiles.

There are consequences to a company when complexity is not managed appropriately

Packaging complexity creates some consequences for companies and their customers, including:

1) Compliance issues: Correct products and components must be supplied to the correct markets with the latest approved product information. With ever-increasing portfolio complexity, exercising appropriate jurisdiction control over what is supplied and to where, gets more difficult. Many companies have tried to overcome this complexity by supplying smaller markets with standard ‘general export’ type packs, only to find unexpected and uncontrolled local repacking. This practice obviously presents an unacceptable compliance risk if not managed effectively.

2) Lost commercial opportunities and product unavailability: Sometimes the financial trade-off between suppling a unique pack variant to a market versus the cost of supply doesn’t merit selling that product in that location. That may be considered a victory in minimising complexity, but it is a lost commercial opportunity leaving patients in that market unable to benefit from that product being made available to them. It is therefore a hollow victory that could be avoided if the company had more cost-effective capabilities to supply such variants.

3) Packaging inefficiencies: Small volumes mean small pack runs and lots of changeovers. We have seen examples where the packaging line spends more time being changed over than packing product. Complexity can also create needs for specific additional tooling, equipment and hand finishing.

4) Support function inefficiencies: There is a whole ‘hidden factory’ in the support functions supporting the product and component range e.g. additional regulatory staff maintaining licenses and product information or more purchasing activity. This is often invisible and not considered in the cost of supply.

5) Obsolescence: There are two relevant types of obsolescence; packaging components and finished product. Economic order quantities result in purchased volumes of packaging components that have a disproportionate amount of forward cover, causing high amounts of write-off when components change. Similarly, high inventories of low volume finished pack stock, caused by minimum packaging order quantities, risks either product write-off or repacking due to shelf life expiry.

In my next post in this series, we will look at some of my top tips for ensuring your product portfolio is appropriate for your packaging facility.

Should you have any questions about this or any of my other blogs, if you would like to discuss the packaging complexities within your company or would simply like to request a copy of my booklets, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly on my email [email protected]

Pharmaceutical packaging operations are generally labour and capital intensive and often a source of senior management frustration:

To offset these issues, supply chains are forced to either offer poor service levels or carry excessive stock, with the associated issues of high working capital, ageing stock and high write-offs.

A key underlying issue is balancing the demands of the product portfolio to be packed with the capabilities of the packaging facilities utilised. Portfolio complexity is very necessary for many businesses and there are numerous factors that drive increasing complexity, including different legal requirements, increasing customer service demands and product differentiation.

There are ways to effectively address these challenges:

In this blog series, we will consider these three topics and look at how you may approach a process of improvement.

Assessing the Portfolio Complexity

Portfolios are becoming increasing complex. Many companies have broad product portfolios sold in multiple markets which can provide significant advantage for that business. We see four main drivers increasing portfolio complexity:

  1. Maximising value from current assets: launching as many product variants, into as many markets, through as many channels as possible.
  2. New products for complex conditions with increasingly tailored therapies: these products may be very high value, but the product volume is typically much lower than traditional pharmaceutical products. Moreover, they often have complex dosing regimes, devices or combination products that require specialist and complicated packaging.
  3. Local Market requirements: you cannot sell the product in a certain market without meeting specific market requirements, whether they be legislative or local preferences.
  4. Commercial advantage: providing certain features gives an advantage in the market and the incremental impact on cost of goods is outweighed by the commercial benefits obtained.

Beyond the US and big five European markets, sales volumes can drop dramatically for individual SKUs. Even with the large markets, portfolio expansion and specialised products can result in very low individual SKU volumes. The result is an explosion of packaging components of ever decreasing volumes. We have seen companies where more than fifty percent of their SKU portfolio have daily sales volumes of less than 30 packs and minimum order quantities of packaging batches supply years of stock.

In my next post, we will examine two further ways to address the challenges of portfolio complexity, looking at optimising the packaging facility and considerations for product packaging design. We will also consider the consequences of inappropriately managing complexity.

Should you have any questions about this or any of my other blogs, if you would like to discuss the packaging complexities within your company or would simply like to request a copy of my booklets, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly on my email [email protected]