A leading global biopharmaceutical company, with research and manufacturing divisions around the world, diagnosed its quality control labs with an all-too-common ailment: they were siloed, discordant and inefficient.
Quality control (QC) labs often work under processes and procedures created specifically by each of those sites. This limits pharma companies’ view of lab efficiency, extends the time to release a drug to market and creates a greater level of risk exposure. It was estimated that the labs, collectively, spent more than a hundred thousand hours of full-time, non-value-added work carrying out inefficient or manual processes.
To combat these issues, the company set on a course to harmonize and standardize its QC labs globally to support manufacturing, ensuring its products were both safe and effective in the most efficient way possible. The company also had to guard against a situation in which the labs, individually, became overly byzantine and expensive to staff and operate.