Managing Global Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Networks

This final chapter presents both the reasons and a possible approach for tackling the challenges of today’s globally dispersed manufacturing networks of pharmaceutical companies. Despite of years of discussions about end-to-end value chains the main activities in production optimization in the pharmaceutical industry are still focused on single plant level. Nevertheless we are sure that the industry will have to follow the example of other more advanced manufacturing industries and systematically address production optimization from a true network perspective in the near future. The content of this article will in a first part cover the history of why global companies’ manufacturing is scattered around the world, why this development was not managed from a holistic perspective and what problems and challenges arose with that. It will then give several real life examples for difficulties and challenges such companies face and it will describe some targets and the current gaps between the status-quo and these targets. In the second part of this chapter we present some frameworks that can help managers to align site and network level and to systematically close the gap between status-quo and the targets. Those frameworks are illustrated with one real life example each. Further we will show some implications for the framework application in the pharmaceutical context. In part three we will sum up the content and close the chapter.