Wyeth Pharmaceutical save in excess of $1m with SIMUL8

Wyeth has a long history of pioneering developments in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. Wyeth Pharmaceutical is a worldwide manufacturer of both prescription and over the counter drugs, producing and packaging brands such as Advil, Robitussin and ChapStick.

SIMUL8 has been used within Wyeth to make substantial cost savings for two key projects:

Water Purification System

Due to Food and Drug Administration (FDA) restrictions on certain components, Robitussin and similar products were required to go behind the counter. Wyeth and many other manufacturers in the same situation reformulated their products increasing the water content.

Using SIMUL8 Wyeth modeled their water purification system to determine if there was sufficient existing capacity or if the process could be changed to prevent a capital expansion of between $600k and $1.2m.

SIMUL8 proved that by changing how they managed the system, Wyeth could gain capacity and avoid the additional expansion expenditure. As a result, the expansion project was cut from the annual budget and funds reallocated to another project.

Cost Saving: Between $600k and $1.2m reallocated to other capital projects.

Raw Materials ‘Supermarket’ for Production

Raw materials are brought into Wyeth in large containers. For drug formulations, each must be individually weighed in a ‘pharmacy’ for particular lots. This can take time as the pharmacy must be cleaned between each raw material.

To make subunits of raw materials readily available for production the concept was developed to pre-weigh the materials and store them in bins. But how many bins did they need and of what sizes?

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Once weighed, the subunits had to be used within 30 days. Wyeth had to quantify how much material might be lost. Shelf life can be extended beyond 30 days using a costly validation process, Wyeth had to asses whether the savings in material would justify the cost of the procedure.

Using SIMUL8 the number of bins per size on the floor was reduced from original calculations, saving both floor space and reducing rack costs.

Additionally, it was shown that the cost of validating longer than 30 days would save over $300k per year in raw material waste costs. That validation is now in progress as a direct result of the SIMUL8 project.

Cost Saving: Reduction in bins and floor space resulted in savings of $20-30k and modeling the validation resulted in over $300k annual savings in waste material.

The Results

Total Cost Savings: Use of simulation between these 2 projects, each of which took less than a month from start to finish, resulted in avoiding costs of between $1million to $2million.

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