Optimizing the planning of IBC usage in pharmaceutical industry

Abstract

An Intermediate Bulk Container (IBC) is used to contain raw materials and semi-products in pharmaceutical company ABC. Due to the high price of an IBC, company ABC sought to minimize the number of IBCs needed to support the production of four separate products. In this project, five IBCs drivers that affect or determine the number of IBCs required were identified. Deterministic models were established to determine the minimum number of IBCs needed for each product given the production plan in 2009. The cleaning schedule for IBCs was modified to reuse IBCs as much as possible. In this paper, we analyze the management of 600L IBCs. We simulate a two machines finite-buffer line model to estimate the optimum buffer size. We collected equipment downtime data to estimate the parameters for the simulation model. We use the simulation to determine the number of 600L IBCs needed for each campaign; the number of 600L IBCs was reduced from 12 to 8. Additional analysis examined the reduction of usage of 1800L IBCs.