Process management applications in biopharmaceutical drug production

Genzyme's manufacturing and supply chain organization is responsible for the production and delivery of medically necessary medicines for patients with rare diseases around the world. Because of the nature of the products produced at Genzyme, a lapse in operational performance has societal as well as economic impacts. Therefore increased understanding of the complex production systems at Genzyme is helpful to reduce risk and improve performance. This thesis is an analysis of a system of two critical production processes at Genzyme. These processes are studied collectively because shared resources make them a tightly coupled system. The research is presented in three sections. The first section explores the current state of the system and explains general performance trends. The second section examines the impact of scheduling complexity arising from shared resources. The third section discusses how process improvement methodologies could be applied at Genzyme. The following conclusions arise from the work conducted for this thesis. First, the performance of the system has declined due to an increase in utilization and an already high level of variability. Second, variability caused by shared resource conflicts can be minimized using new scheduling techniques. And finally, continuous improvement methods are recommended to further reduce variability and increase overall process performance.

Department dc:contributor.department

Leaders for Global Operations Program at MIT

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Smith, Stephen E

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Charles Cooney and Steven Spear.

• Sloan School of Management.
• Engineering Systems Division.
• Leaders for Global Operations 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/1721.1/66048

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/66048