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Simultaneous improvement in development time, cost and quality: a practical framework for generic pharmaceuticals industry
Author(s) -
Chaudhuri Atanu
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
randd management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.253
H-Index - 102
eISSN - 1467-9310
pISSN - 0033-6807
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9310.2012.00675.x
Subject(s) - standardization , quality (philosophy) , process (computing) , new product development , pharmaceutical industry , risk analysis (engineering) , context (archaeology) , product (mathematics) , process management , computer science , bridge (graph theory) , time to market , business , marketing , microbiology and biotechnology , medicine , paleontology , philosophy , geometry , mathematics , epistemology , biology , operating system
Generic pharmaceutical companies strive to develop generic versions of drugs to obtain marketing rights after those drugs go off patent. Being a highly competitive industry, these companies have to work towards simultaneously reducing the development time and costs while meeting all the quality standards. While the literature has discussed the multiple trade‐offs in product development, there is limited research on how the companies can break these trade‐offs and simultaneously improve performance on multiple objectives and particularly in the context of the generic pharmaceutical industry. In this research, we try to bridge this gap and develop an improvement framework for simultaneously achieving the objectives in terms of development time, cost and quality. We apply the framework in a generic pharmaceutical company by redesigning its new product development process following S ix S igma methodologies and demonstrate the benefits through pilot projects with varying levels of complexity. The results show that a well‐designed process which facilitates process standardization, optimization and collaboration can help in simultaneously achieving improvements in development time, cost and quality.