Cover Story
News
Cover Story
chilled or frozen conditions. These tend to be high-value, high-priced drugs – produced in smaller quantities
and with a fairly short shelf life. This calls for different
production and logistics processes, involving more frequent product movements and dedicated storage areas.
Design a Flexible Solution
To meet immediate and future challenges, pharmaceutical
distributors need to engineer an automated, highly flexible
infrastructure. Advances in system automation and software
provide new levels of efficiency and lower long-term costs.
Today’s automated infrastructures have long lifecycles. By
making flexibility a core element in system design today, you
will be well positioned to respond to industry changes long
into the future. Flexible automation allows you to quickly
react to changes in product range, factory layout, and consumer demands. It’s ironic that in such a regulated industry,
flexibility is the key to meeting challenges in the supply chain.
Three ingredients will help maximize automation flexibility
and efficiency: A clear strategic plan, a holistic approach to
solution design, and an investment in advanced automation.
Identify Strategies & Requirements
Begin by clearly reviewing your distribution strategies
and their impact on logistics. For example, are you planning to distribute directly to pharmacists or patients, or
go through a wholesaler? Will you utilize new manufacturing sites, or modernize legacy warehouses? What
other technical requirements will be needed? Answering questions like these will help you to determine the
best solution for managing logistics and distribution. A
qualified consulting team, with solid industry experience,
can help develop your strategic plan and requirements.
Take a Holistic Approach
With clear distribution strategies and technical requirements defined, the next step is to plan your intralogistics
automation system. Taking a holistic view of your systems, people and processes is key. When adding a new
system, be sure it is robust, and can adapt to meet current and future challenges. For example, tracking, tracing, and reporting on the movement of a product will put
tremendous pressure on factory logistics. The process of
managing pallets of products, and reporting which products were shipped or transferred off each pallet, will overwhelm operators attempting to record everything manually.
Bundling all intralogistic automation into one holistic infrastructure ensures transparency of all product-relevant information. You can standardize advanced func-
tions of all management systems
across your operations to improve operational processes and increase
transparency in the warehouse. And,
high levels of standardization minimize risk of error and failure rates.
Establishing an over-arching technical
framework that will continuously capture and process product and logistics
data is essential. Logistical software is
an integral part of the overall IT environment. It needs to be adaptable, allowing
you to connect to high-level and low-level
systems using standardized interfaces.
Put Automation to Work
Justifying the investment in advanced automation can be done quickly. For example, the need to store and handle smaller
quantity batches cost-effectively requires
a well-integrated, automated system.
Handling smaller units at high frequencies within your overall warehouse system
will increase movement and require systematic tracking. In order to handle these
smaller units, you may need to store them
in something much smaller than 2-cubicmeter pallets. Advanced automation can
reduce errors, improve throughput and
track small-batch drugs most efficiently.
As a case in point, Swisslog recently installed a highly automated system for a
pharmaceutical company in Europe. Designed to meet the customer’s requirements after all needs and concerns were
fully understood, the system uses sophis-
February 2016
39