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The Customer
Aventis a worldwide leading manufacturer of pharmaceutical products, headquartered in Strasbourg, France was founded in 2002 by a merger between the two companies Rhône-Poulenc and Hoechst. The company focuses on the development, production and marketing of highly innovative prescription drugs in order to improve currently inefficient patient treatment strategies. With its 8,100 employees and a turnover of 2.7 billion euros the German entity (Aventis Pharma Deutschland GmbH) based in Frankfurt is one of the leading pharmaceutical manufacturers on the German market.
The Project
Manufacturing prescription drug substances is an intermittent process. Quality management of intermediate and final products is a very important task that has to be performed quickly and reliable in order to deliver instant feedback to the production area. Aventis has several QM laboratories in place that are responsible for product quality management. Each laboratory receives production samples 24 by 7. High efficiency and short processing times are critical performance indicators for every test laboratory and it is mission critical to feedback the test results to the manufacturing plants on time.
In 2002 PROMATIS was asked by Aventis to participate in a reorganization and optimization project aiming for an overall optimization of the quality management laboratories. Simulation technologies were used to evaluate existing processes and also to compare alternative future process scenarios with each other.
During the project INCOME Process Designer was used for documenting all relevant processes and INCOME Simulator was used to carry out the simulation studies. At the beginning all processes were documented and simulation was used to verify the correctness of the models. In the second step process variations were created and simulation was used to identify significant optimization potentials.
The Future
In the second project that is currently on the way Aventis has decided not only to analyze and improve processes related to the quality management laboratories, but to enhance the focus of the project on the entire drug substance manufacturing process. Currently 5 Aventis plants responsible for manufacturing 5 different drug substances are subject to optimization.
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