Company Background

PharmaGlass Co $.$ ?is a leading Polish pharmaceutical glass manufacturer offering a solution for the entire range of basic volume tubular glass parenteral packaging including ampoules, vials, cartridges, and sterile pre $-$ fillable syringes.

They have multiple manufacturing plants in Europe, America, and South $-$ East Asia.

PharmaGlass has customers all over the world and supplies to over $120$ ?countries.

Changing Landscape

?PharmaGlass Co $.$ ?aims to provide pharmaceutical vials for COVID $-19$ ?vaccines to Payima Biotec $($ a global generic and specialty pharmaceutical and vaccine maker $)$ ?and other similar entities. They have signed agreements with major pharmaceutical firms to supply glass products to package two billion COVID $-19$ ?vaccines.

The vaccine being developed currently can only be stored in glass vials. When the vaccine is approved, globally, manufacturers will struggle to source enough glass vials, syringes, and ampoules to bottle enough for the global immunization drive.

PharmaGlass manufactures over $8$ ?billion pharma glass containers for drugs annually.

PROBLEM:

There's a glass shortage due to the sudden increase in demand for such products.

Many of the suppliers are small and localized, and PharmaGlass needs to be sure that none of its suppliers are facing business continuity challenges due to the pandemic.

Manufacturers globally face financial and operational challenges; the demand is unpredictable, and concerns are related to shortages and stockouts.

OUR ROLE:

The current Supply Chain Operations VP Operations at PharmaGlass has hired your team to leverage expertise around three critical areas her team has identified:

First, the Manager of the Procurement and Sourcing team has heard from the CPO that some of the critical suppliers are facing operational challenges due to the pandemic.

She thereby, intends to develop a high $-$ level risk scoring methodology or rationale to score the suppliers and review mitigation activities currently in place.

Based on the supplier data available, the Risk Compliance Manager has currently identified two risk domains $-$ ?Finance, and Regulatory.

As part of the $$ Regulatory $$ ?risk domain, she intends to score each supplier based on the risk factors $$ ?Labor unrest, and Environmental incidents.

She wants your team to identify other risk domains and factors contributing to the risk domains based on the available supplier data.

She wants your team to develop a comprehensive risk $-$ scoring methodology and identify suppliers that pose the most risk.

The marketing team has gathered insights regarding the anticipated demand trend for various SKUs based on their product families.

Your team as part of this project, has been requested to estimate the change in the inventory position to understand the working capital impact in one of the most critical plants in Switzerland, CrystalWerks. Based on the marketing insights gathered, she also wants to understand the potential obsolete inventory they currently have.

The third area of concern is to identify if there is any capacity constraint for Machinas, the new facilities in Chicago, due to the sudden increase in demand for their products in the US $.$ ?

The Plant Controller feels the current capacity is inadequate to meet his forecasted demand.

However, the VP of Operations for PharmaGlass is certain that there is enough capacity to meet the requirements.

Your team needs to evaluate if there is a capacity constraint for Machines and provide recommendations on maximizing utilization to meet the demand at current capacity.

Based on the operations of PharmaGlass, provide recommendations on how it should meet the increase in demand for these products. Explain why the Plant Manager feels the capacity is inadequate and why the VP of Operations feels the capacity is enough. The products are needed for vaccines for other diseases, too. Glass vials are very hard and time $-$ consuming to make. Sometimes, the manufacturing process takes months. Even though coronavirus is the most pressing health issue in the world, PharmaGlass wants to maintain a supply of their products for other critical vaccines which cannot be distorted from the COVID $-19$ ?vaccine vials supply.