Member Article

NEPIC & Arch Group promote North East Pharma Sector in Vienna

NEPIC (the North East Process Industry Cluster) and Northumberland Development Company, Arch Group have collaborated to correct the anomaly surrounding the strength of the Pharmaceutical sector in the Northeast England.

This week colleagues from the two organisations took this message to Vienna for the ‘9th Annual Project & Portfolio Management in the Pharmaceutical Industry Conference’, where they highlighted the region’s capabilities across the full Pharmaceutical value chain and discussed how the Industry can learn from other industrial sectors.

The strength of the pharmaceutical industry, particular north of the Tyne and in Northumberland in particular was presented, showcasing regional companies including MSD, Covance, SCM Pharma, Piramel Healthcare, Proctor & Gamble, The Specials Laboratory, Aesica Pharmaceuticals, Thermofisher Scientific and Shasun Pharma Solutions.

NEPIC CEO Dr. Stan Higgins shared the productivity journey taken by companies in Northeast England as a result of Nissan’s investment –focusing on supervisory training, the development of a common approach tool kit, manufacturing excellence and benchmarking programmes and the enormous benefits achieved.

The team showcased the regions highlights sharing manufacturing excellence case studies from MSD and Sanofi Aventis, where in one case £1.4 million of savings were achieved following just one master class in performance improvement. 50% inventory reduction, 50% maintenance costs reduction and right-first-time manufacturing increases from 72% to 94% were also presented.

Companies in attendance included global players such as Dr Reddy’s, Astra Zeneca, Abbott Laboratories, Alk-Abello, AbbVie, Arterium, Bayer Healthcare, Boehringer-Inglhiem, Cipla, Egis Healthcare, EVER Neuro Pharma, Genentech, Merz, Merck, Novartis, Novosecta, Orion Pharma, Quintiles and Roche amongst others.

Discussions quickly highlighted that even attending UK delegates were unaware of the sector strengths in the Northeast England, despite of 35pc of UK pharmaceutical manufacturing taking place here. This anomaly coupled with the sector not being properly represented within Office for National Statistics data, due to the ‘branch office’ effect, is concerning. However, thanks to the combined efforts of the NEPIC-Arch collaboration this situation is being been corrected.

Commenting on the situation Dr Higgins said: “We must keep promoting our regions capabilities if we are to increase both trade and investment. Getting speaking slots at major international conferences such as this is a great way to spread the word about our regions industrial strengths. He continued:

“NEPIC has put the region’s Process Industry back on the map over recent years using this strategy. This week Vienna, last week the World Trade Organisation conference in India, again generating several technology and investment leads for our members and the region. I hope going forward new LEP structures will be able to help us more with this work.”

NEPIC and Arch have collaborated in the promotion of the region’s pharmaceutical sector over recent years including a successful marketing campaign with Next Generation Pharmaceuticals – a leading sector European B2B publication for Senior Executives.

www.nepic.co.uk

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by NEPIC .