Optimizing Production and Enhancing Product Quality for Contract Pharmacal Corp.

As operations continued to grow, Contract Pharmacal Corp. (CPC) – a manufacturer of premium pharmaceuticals, over-the-counter drugs, and dietary supplements – needed to optimize production to continue meeting customer demand while ensuring product quality. As part of one client contract, CPC built a dedicated plant in Hauppauge, NY that included eight large-scale lines where they were required to provide their client insight into line capacity and production efficiency. However, CPC faced several challenges with doing this including a lack of real-time production data, minimal insight into the cause of downtime and production issues, and a lack of transparency between shifts.

To address these challenges and create manufacturer-to-customer transparency, CPC reached out to Applied Control Engineering (ACE), a Parsec Certified Partner, to design and implement a manufacturing execution system (MES) using the TrakSYS platform. The new MES system we developed and implemented included real-time dashboards that displayed the current state of production on monitors throughout the facility, recent production history reports, and clear OEE metrics for each line and piece of equipment (Figure 1). We also created reports that could be aggregated or filtered by date for any line, piece of equipment, shift, product, or job. A filterable waterfall chart was also developed for a full analysis of performance with drill downs to the underlying causes.

Figure 1. An overview screen showing the status of four of the eight lines running at CPC.

In addition to meeting their client’s requirements for transparency, CPC also optimized production by experiencing the following additional benefits:

• A path towards increasing yield by 3 percent
• Productivity improvements of 3 to 16 percent per line via measurable OEE improvements
• A reduction in changeover times from 12 to 4 hours

To hear more details about how we collaborated with CPC to create this solution and learn how a similar MES solution could be deployed in your organization to improve production efficiency, watch the on-demand Webinar or read the full case study.