At Clarity Pharma, we pride ourselves on being at the forefront of pharmaceutical distribution in the UK, which means that we know a thing or two about reducing costs without compromising on quality. With this is in mind, we thought we would put together some helpful information on how to reduce pharmaceutical costs in an industry where quality is paramount. Here are just a few options you could consider when looking for ways to reduce costs and retain quality.
Can You Negotiate on Individual Raw Materials?
The first option to begin reducing pharmaceutical costs is to analyse your raw materials and components, think about the possibility of meeting with your vendors and negotiating on costs. If you’re not sure how this is possible, simply ask them for any advice on reducing the costs and they may already have a couple of ideas. Suggestions may include trying different ordering patterns or compromising on the way in which you receive the material. For example, if your materials are usually delivered in numerous drums or bags, you may find yourself saving on overall testing burdens if they were to be delivered as a single tote of material instead. In short, the less containers you receive the less material ID’s a laboratory will have to perform, and this means less material sampling needed by a quality assurance group.
Identify Ways to Better Process Efficiencies
In order to better your process efficiencies to reduce costs, you need to discuss with your contract manufacturer about the challenges that you are facing. Your contract manager will know better than anyone how to cut costs effectively, as they know both the production process and the materials. You might want to discuss with them the possibility of campaigning a product, which simply means to manufacturing multiple lots, all back-to-back. This will save a lot on the cleaning and set-up time for your equipment and in turn have an effect on the costs.
Combine Packaging and Bulk Products
Another way for you to consider how to reduce pharmaceutical costs, is to combine product lots into one finished product line? This may seem like a simple and perhaps an unimportant change but consider it like this; if you have combined bulk lots into one finished product line, your quality group will be doing doing fewer lot closeouts, fewer line closeouts, and even fewer batch record reviews. Inevitably, this type of efficiency will lead again to lower costs but levels of quality continue to remain the same.
Even by re-thinking your packaging, you can cut on costs and unit costs as a result from combining bulk lots as this means you can utilise one long packaging run. Again, saving on costs in this way all comes down to saving you multiple change overs of mechanics setting up the line again, cleaning it, and to do quality assurance line clearances. This totals up to rather large costs which you many not have previously realised, so is a great way to simply and effectively cut costs without damaging quality.
