This paper recommends strategies that should be taken by Acme Manufacturing Company, a drug manufacturing company.
This paper explains that full-time employees may become more difficult to find as unemployment drops; therefore, Acme needs to explore all avenues for labor access, such as outsourcing. The author points out that the company should develop retention plans to retain existing employees because turnover is very expensive due to retraining costs. The paper states that the FDA issued guidance to the industry on the use of new quality-testing technologies, which Acme should consider.
“The FDA’s new initiative will focus oversight only on the plants and processes that are more at risk for errors that affect patient safety as opposed to older practices of scrutinizing all production steps. The FDA is also seeking to minimize the number of production changes requiring advance approval and is planning to let companies submit interim manufacturing specifications for drugs. All these efforts open the door for the pharmaceutical industry to bring their manufacturing techniques in line with best-of-class operations in other industries. Given the tremendous numbers of recalls and rework and waste, there are ample opportunities for process improvement. For example, the FDA reported 354 prescription-drug recalls in 2002, almost double 1998 numbers. Five to ten percent of medicine that’s produced has to be reworked or discarded compared to 0.0001 percent in the semiconductor industry.”