ELI LILLY: DEVELOPING CYMBALTA

Eli Lilly: Developing Cymbalta

Eli Lilly: Developing Cymbalta

Introduction

Eli Lilly and Company Limited is an affiliate of Eli Lilly Company in Indianapolis, Indiana and one of the UK's leading research based pharmaceutical manufacturing comp­anies, with an R&D center in Windlesham, Surrey, manufacturing sites in Basingstoke and Speke, and a distribution center that exports medicines to many parts of the world. The UK arm won the Queen's Award for International Trade in 1974, 1996 and 2001 and the Queen's Award for Innovation in 2000. The Basingstoke operation opened in 1939, and the site is still dominated by the elegant original building that overlooks the railway line, which was its main connection to the outside world. As well as the UK sales and marketing and IT teams, 450 people work on the manufacturing and packaging of more than 50 different named products at anyone time.

Discussion

A few years ago, if a chemist at Eli Lilly and Co. enjoyed an "ah-ha" moment about a new substance that might lead to a great new miracle drug—and huge new profits—the first thing he or she would have to do is check a database to see if anyone else in the global pharmaceutical company had enjoyed a similar insight. Then he or she would have to check a second database. And then he or she would have to check yet a third—and even then not know for sure. Problem was, the three different Lilly substance databases didn't store information under the same labels or registration numbers, so it wasn't always clear what Lilly knew or didn't: A researcher in Singapore might have registered the substance, but under a different name, slowing the process of discoveries to a walk instead of a run. And that was just one speed bump slowing researchers in the urgent race to get new drugs to market.

Manufacturing drugs is a highly regulated and precise undertaking - and that precision is also essential in their packing, which has to conform to the many different legal and cultural requirements of the countries to which they are exported. Production runs can be short, and it is not unusual for the setup of complex packaging lines to be changed several times in a week. Maintenance is an important issue, not just with regard to keeping down cost, but keeping up to tight schedules

And maintenance at Basingstoke has become a matter of pride. The statistics tell the story. From 1997 to date, conformance to weekly maintenance planning schedule has improved from 0%to 95%. Since December 2000, the rolling 12-month mean time between failures (MTBF) on key packaging lines has increased from about 40 hours to about 70 hours. In the same period, the rolling 12-month MTBF on key air conditioning systems has increased from about 800 hours to about 1800 hours. One result is that overdue work orders have decreased since January 2001 from more than 100 per month to fewer than ten

How has this been achieved? Until about ten years ago, there was no planned ...