Dompe reduces errors and improves quality

“For us, the key things which made the [software] implementation successful were good organisation and the fact that user requirements were well-known within the company,” says Marco Monterasso, information systems manager at Italian pharmaceuticals maker Dompe. “And we made the production manager head of the project because he’s close to the people who are using the system.” Dompe makes tens of millions of units of solids, liquids, creams and ointments at its production plant in L’Aquila, and turns over around £40 million a year. There are 150 employees at the site, about 60 of these in production. The software Monterasso is talking about is Honeywell’s POMS MES (manufacturing execution system) which manages the whole of the firm’s manufacturing operations, from warehousing through to dispensing, bulk manufacturing and packaging. For pharmaceutical manufacturers, increasing competition, market globalisation and higher quality standards are now forcing major changes in the IT needed to run these businesses profitably. And with contract manufacturing now making up about 60% of Dompe’s overall business, having good visibility of your manufacturing process is essential. Although Dompe has been using POMS since 1992, the last seven years have seen a dramatic shift in its IT infrastructure, software upgrades and supporting hardware. Until 1999, it had an earlier version (2.1) of POMS MES running on OS/2. It also used Intellution’s Fix DMACS SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system, and a number of customised in-house EBR (electronic batch record) systems, plus some reporting and label generation programs. According to Monterasso though, “The real issue we had was the frequent need for programming activity, which was becoming time consuming and costly.” So in early 2000, Dompe’s senior management decided to upgrade POMS MES to version 4.1.2 and overhaul the supporting IT infrastructure. This meant replacing the token ring network to Fast Ethernet, and buying new servers, printers, scanners and workstations, plus an upgrade of Fix DMACS to the latest version, iFixTM. OS/2 was also replaced with Windows NT and Crystal reporting software was implemented to interface and produce tailored reports from POMS. The results have been dramatic. For starters, Dompe now has better recipe management. As production manager of the plant, Stefano Scorsini explains: “Prior to the new version, we were finding it difficult to create new recipes. We spent too much time programming the software and extracting reports. “We now have recipe control on each single step of the production process: dispensing, manufacturing and packaging. We capture process parameters and monitor equipment status. It [POMS] gives us detailed operator instructions and automatic process reports with yield, dosage rates and weight control … Data is transferred automatically now, from machines to scales, to PLCs and probes.” But it’s not the only area that’s profiting from POMS. Through automatic data exchange, Dompe production staff can now detect critical parameter deviations, investigate the reasons and then define corrective measures to be taken. “A typical recipe here can be as much as 60 pages,” says Scorsini. “Every step requires the signature of the operator and spaces for numerical calculations. We were wasting half the day completing stuff like this. Now it’s all done with automatic generation of batch records [EBR]: even the signatures are now electronic. We’re spending less time calculating yields and more time checking the production line is running OK.” Serious benefits Over the past five years Dompe’s technical director, Dr Marco Dell’Uomo, estimates that the company has spent, “More than one billion Lire [£350,000] on IT software, hardware and infrastructure.” The firm bought 20 new POMS/Oracle workstations and several new servers. But he denies that any sort of return on investment calculations were done before the new IT was installed. “We just knew we needed software that gave us a quality guarantee for our products.” From an IT perspective, Dompe IT staff can now easily develop applications to sit alongside POMS, and they can interface more easily with the new version. But on the user side, Scorsini says the benefits are more compelling: “We’ve improved the quality of our product. We have less manual errors in production now and we’re detecting equipment and process problems earlier – before they actually happen sometimes - through closer real-time monitoring of equipment.” And last but not least, Scorsini says that some of the company’s production capacity is also now freed-up, allowing Dompe’s sales staff to go and tout for more business, particularly from the contract manufacturing sector. “POMS is an integral part of our operations here.”