Contract Pharmacal Corp. (CPC) develops, manufactures, and packages premium pharmaceuticals, over-the-counter drugs, and dietary supplements.

As part of one client contract, CPC built a dedicated plant with eight large-scale lines where they were required to provide their client insight into line capacity and production efficiency. To create this manufacturer-to-customer transparency and optimize operations, CPC reached out to Parsec Certified Partner Applied Control Engineering (ACE) to design and implement a manufacturing execution system (MES) using the TrakSYS platform.

CPC’s main goals with implementing this system were twofold – view line production in real-time and create a comprehensive searchable database of past production runs to identify and resolve inefficiencies. To do this, ACE worked with CPC to create real-time dashboards with current status information, recent production history, and OEE metrics for each line and piece of equipment. Monitors were installed throughout the plant to track real-time performance, which made it easy for operators to identify underperforming lines and enabled teams to get a head start on line maintenance to address inefficiencies.

Additionally, reports were created that could be aggregated or filtered by date for any line, piece of equipment, shift, product, or job. A filterable waterfall chart was also developed for a full analysis of performance with drill-downs to the underlying causes.

As a result of this well-thought-out MES that takes data from the plant floor, contextualizes it, and makes it available to the right people at the right time, CPC is experiencing the following benefits:

• A path towards increasing yield by 3 percent
• Productivity improvements of 3 to 16 percent per line via measurable OEE improvements
• A reduction in changeover times from 12 to 4 hours
• The ability to meet their customer’s requirement for production visibility

To hear more details about how ACE and CPC worked together to create this solution and learn how a similar MES solution could be deployed in your organization to improve production efficiency, watch the recording.