Artwork and continuous improvement at global pharma player

At a glance

For about 3 months, a Lanark young supply chain engineer took on the role of artwork and BOM planner at a global biopharmaceutical company, responsible for correctly setting unique serial numbers on medicines. The job then broadened to implementing continuous improvements to deal with recurring performance issues.

The challenge?

Counterfeit medication can be life-threatening and needs to be avoided at all costs. Therefore, to ensure the authenticity of its medication, a multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company applies a unique serial number to each medicine. This number is not chosen randomly, but contains detailed information, allowing for instance to trace it back to its original batch number. For this information to be accurate, maintaining correct master data is key.

Lanark’s solution

A Lanark supply chain engineer took on the job of the artwork and BOM planner for more than 3 months. This essential role sits in the labelling operations department and is responsible for maintaining, supervising and accurately assigning unique serial numbers on medicines.

Defining this serial number is part of the artwork, which also includes the logo, colours, font, packaging type and size, package leaflet, labels and so on. Given the different country regulations, this content needs to be managed carefully. To facilitate any changes in the artwork, there is a constant information exchange between the artwork and BOM planners, various departments and governments. Timely and correct completion and maintenance of the master data is thus a very important part of this role.

After this initial support, the role of the Lanark supply chain engineer evolved to include implementing process optimisations through continuous improvements. The goal is to identify recurring performance issues via a set of KPIs, develop sustainable process improvements, and set clear and feasible deadlines to implement the required changes.

To prevent fraud and counterfeit medication a large biopharmaceutical company uses a unique serial number for each medicine. As essential part of defining such a serial number is having up-to-date master data.

“Imagine a patient falling ill because of wrong product information, such as the shelf life, on the package leaflet of a specific medicine. Maintaining correct master data and have a reliable system are therefore key.”

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