Managing maintenance costs of pharmaceutical research and development

Drug Discovery is a race to be the first to patent a drug that meets a significant medical need in the world. Many pharmaceutical companies are now using automation extensively to improve consistency and aid personnel in testing the millions of potential drug candidates within their labs. Because these machines play an important role in drug discovery, there is significant interest in managing their maintenance. The concern is that downtime is hampering the efforts of drug discovery. This project has sought to reduce that downtime and manage maintenance costs by working with the Technical Operations Group, Novartis' in-house maintenance team. The main objectives have been to devise a better way for evaluating maintenance contracts, improve the availability of the equipment, and instill a culture of continuous improvement in the group. This study shows that maximizing equipment utilization should be a higher priority than reducing downtime. The data show that the high throughput systems are only used an average of three days a week. Reducing downtime, which is most often measured on the scale of minutes, is unlikely to bring about the gains that would be realized by improving capacity utilization. Current metrics and data collection procedures are ineffective for determining automation needs and performance as well as engineer performance. A new system for data collection was implemented along with improvement projects as an introduction to lean principles, with the primary objective being a self-sustaining system of finding process improvements.

Department dc:contributor.department

Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Butts, Jared (Jared C.)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Daniel Whitney and Roy E. Welsch.

• Sloan School of Management.
• Engineering Systems Division.
• Leaders for Manufacturing Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/49792

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/49792