Sanofi-aventis Witnesses Healthy Benefits With Lanner

Sanofi-aventis make £1.4 million worth of inventory cost savings in just six months. 

Lanner today announced that leading pharmaceutical company, Sanofi-aventis, has completed the implementation of WITNESS into one of its major UK sites. The full rollout of Lanner’s WITNESS simulation software follows an extremely successful phase one implementation, which has already seen Sanofi-aventis make £1.4 million worth of inventory cost savings in just six months.

The driver behind adopting WITNESS was a change in production methods at sanofi-aventis’ Fawdon site, with the packaging of drugs shifting from boxes of 10kg to mass containers of 300kg. This meant that sanofi-aventis needed to re-evaluate its existing production lines to understand the best approach to maximising production efficiency.

By adding science to decision making, Lanner’s process simulation software, WITNESS, has helped thousands of customers achieve substantial efficiency gains across a variety of sectors including pharmaceutical, criminal justice, manufacturing, energy, nuclear, IT, aviation, and the public sector.

It works by giving users the power and flexibility to model a working environment, simulate the implications of different business decisions and understand any process, however complex. As a result, users such as sanofi-aventis can always be confident that they have found the best business solution for their organisation before making a financial commitment to change.

Trevor Norman, Continuous Improvement Manager, sanofi-aventis, comments: “The wholesale shift in material storage between the manufacturing and packaging processes required that we give serious consideration to how best to operate our production lines. We have 11 lines in total so knowing how to derive maximum benefit from production to include all variables around quantity, capacity and frequency of products, at any given time, required extra help.

“With the help of Lanner we simulated a virtual model of our production lines with the new production methods accounted for, and provided us with the data we needed to maximise production efficiency, which in turn reduced our inventory by a massive £1.4 million in the first six months alone.”

David Jones, CEO, Lanner comments:

“Pharmaceutical companies are under more pressure than ever to find ways in which they can make efficiency savings, so it is vital that they are seen to be making steps to achieve this. We are therefore delighted that by using WITNESS, sanofi-aventis have made such positive strides in achieving substantial cost savings in just a few short months with Lanner’s help.” 

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