Increasing demand for flexible volumes
New, specific drugs for a variety of autoimmune diseases are penetrating the market. This leads to changes: numerous new drug manufacturers, many new drugs and new requirements for injection systems. If you want to be one of the players, you have to be flexible and adapt your production concepts accordingly.
If one currently lives with an autoimmune disease, such as rheumatoid arthritis, there is a limited number of drugs for therapy, so one drug is used for a variety of diseases. This is changing. A large number of new, very specific drugs are being developed and will be on the market in the next few years. Each of the new drugs targets a specific disease. As a result, the corresponding market will diversify and more pharmaceutical companies will offer a larger number of drugs, but in smaller quantities. This is good for the market and the patients, but also a challenge for the manufacturers of injection devices, as the demands on the injection devices themselves are changing. New drugs no longer have to be injected quite as regularly or as often, but therefore in higher injection volumes. Some novel drugs are also more viscous. We have been observing the trend towards auto and patch injectors for some time now. Products such as the YpsoMate in its variants and the YpsoDose patch injector are thus gaining in importance and potential. In general, this calls for increased efficiency in the creation of product variants and correspondingly greater flexibility in production.
Flexible production systems
Our platform strategy plays into our hands in terms of the flexible production of customer-specific variants. Even today we can already serve a large number of different customer projects for different product variants. The new drugs on the market and the many new pharmaceutical companies are bringing us a large number of new customer projects for our platform products.
“Production System 2020” as the next step
In order to be able to satisfy the specific needs of our customers in the future too, we are constantly optimising our production processes. The next step in the flexible production of platform products is the implementation of our “Production System 2020”. With this new approach, we will be even better positioned in the future when it comes to serving the massively increased variety of variants. The intention of “Production System 2020” is to shorten throughput times in production, reduce planning effort through self-controlling control loops and optimise the flow of goods. This will enable us to produce more variants in a shorter time and also makes it easier to handle varying order sizes.
The Schwerin location doubles capacities
With the start of production at our new site in Schwerin in northern Germany, we are almost doubling our production capacity. If required, production in Schwerin can be further expanded by mirroring the production building. This enables us to meet the growing demand for injection and infusion systems in the long term without any problems. The highly automated equipment in Schwerin and the installation of a fully functional clean room will enable us to react quickly to market requirements. The construction project in Schwerin is progressing according to plan. The topping out ceremony took place at the end of June 2018 and production will start in the second quarter of 2019. The industrialisation projects for the new site have also started and the first injection moulding machines and fully automatic assembly lines have been ordered. With the opening of the new production site in Schwerin next year we will realise the further expansion of large-volume products and also ensure the agile production of customer products in smaller quantities and the industrialisation of new products at the Swiss production sites.
