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Cover Story News Cover Story chilled or frozen conditions. These tend to be high-value, high-priced drugs – produced in smaller quantities and with a fairly short shelf life. This calls for different production and logistics processes, involving more frequent product movements and dedicated storage areas. Design a Flexible Solution To meet immediate and future challenges, pharmaceutical distributors need to engineer an automated, highly flexible infrastructure. Advances in system automation and software provide new levels of efficiency and lower long-term costs. Today’s automated infrastructures have long lifecycles. By making flexibility a core element in system design today, you will be well positioned to respond to industry changes long into the future. Flexible automation allows you to quickly react to changes in product range, factory layout, and consumer demands. It’s ironic that in such a regulated industry, flexibility is the key to meeting challenges in the supply chain. Three ingredients will help maximize automation flexibility and efficiency: A clear strategic plan, a holistic approach to solution design, and an investment in advanced automation. Identify Strategies & Requirements Begin by clearly reviewing your distribution strategies and their impact on logistics. For example, are you planning to distribute directly to pharmacists or patients, or go through a wholesaler? Will you utilize new manufacturing sites, or modernize legacy warehouses? What other technical requirements will be needed? Answering questions like these will help you to determine the best solution for managing logistics and distribution. A qualified consulting team, with solid industry experience, can help develop your strategic plan and requirements. Take a Holistic Approach With clear distribution strategies and technical requirements defined, the next step is to plan your intralogistics automation system. Taking a holistic view of your systems, people and processes is key. When adding a new system, be sure it is robust, and can adapt to meet current and future challenges. For example, tracking, tracing, and reporting on the movement of a product will put tremendous pressure on factory logistics. The process of managing pallets of products, and reporting which products were shipped or transferred off each pallet, will overwhelm operators attempting to record everything manually. Bundling all intralogistic automation into one holistic infrastructure ensures transparency of all product-relevant information. You can standardize advanced func- tions of all management systems across your operations to improve operational processes and increase transparency in the warehouse. And, high levels of standardization minimize risk of error and failure rates. Establishing an over-arching technical framework that will continuously capture and process product and logistics data is essential. Logistical software is an integral part of the overall IT environment. It needs to be adaptable, allowing you to connect to high-level and low-level systems using standardized interfaces. Put Automation to Work Justifying the investment in advanced automation can be done quickly. For example, the need to store and handle smaller quantity batches cost-effectively requires a well-integrated, automated system. Handling smaller units at high frequencies within your overall warehouse system will increase movement and require systematic tracking. In order to handle these smaller units, you may need to store them in something much smaller than 2-cubicmeter pallets. Advanced automation can reduce errors, improve throughput and track small-batch drugs most efficiently. As a case in point, Swisslog recently installed a highly automated system for a pharmaceutical company in Europe. Designed to meet the customer’s requirements after all needs and concerns were fully understood, the system uses sophis- February 2016 39