Flexible Manufacturing
The consumer demand for companies to provide better, affordable, and additional medicines globally has pressured manufacturers to innovate manufacturing processes that are efficient and flexible. To address this consumer demand, manufacturers aim to produces medicines close to the consumer. This means that more plants sprinkled strategically across the world will be producing multiple products appropriate to that market. Central to this concept is to produce multiple products from the same set of assets - hence the tem Flexible manufacturing. There are several aspects required for a successful flexible manufacturing strategy. The glue to this strategy is automation. This session will include a group discussion where individual ideas will be unveiled and synthesized into one coherent thesis. The sub topics of the group discussion are:
• Define the flavors of Flexible Manufacturing (there are several approaches)
• Challenge the hypothesis. Do we really need FM?
• Where/How does Instrumentation, Process Control, Operations Management/MES, and Data Management fit in FM (or what are the basic requirements for….)
NOTES from the RED breakout group
WHAT is it?
Ability to produce different products in different equipment with little effort
Compliant qualifications the first time
Single use equipment
Portable equipment
Standards & concepts
WHY
CMO
Capacity utilization
Product development
Standard platform
Fast to market
Challenges
Complex configurations
Costs
Equipment requirements
Equipment flexibility
Process changovers / time
Cleaning and validation
Scheduling and forecasting
Batch recipe generation
Change management
Managing shared equipment
Solutions
Justification
Define interfaces
Standard modules
Flexible piping schemes
Standard concepts