AstraZeneca is a global, science-led, patient-focused pharmaceutical company headquartered in Cambridge, UK. With more than 10,000 artwork changes per year, AstraZeneca needed to upgrade its Artwork Management solution to support corporate strategy, ensure business continuity and minimize risk. They also wanted to reduce the amount of time needed to complete changes to packaging artwork.
AstraZeneca’s pharmaceutical packaging components include cartons, leaflets, foils and labels, each of which must comply with rigorous global regulations as well as good practice (GxP) guidelines and rules. There are more than 1,000 users involved in AstraZeneca’s Artwork Management process, including external partners, contract marketing organizations and external design studios, across 21 sites and approximately 80 marketing companies. It was important for Russell Collins, the Director of Global Labelling Business Process, and the team at AstraZeneca to select a solution that was process-led and not system-led.
AstraZeneca realized that to improve efficiency, including shortening lead times and enabling agility across the Global Labeling Business Process, they needed a flexible and customer-managed packaging artwork solution that supported their strategy to drive continuous process improvements in their packaging artwork operations. Requirements for the new solution included the ability to onboard new sites, external partners and customers, and help users follow a global process without requiring any customization that could add costs and slow the system upgrade process as new releases became available. After much research and time spent defining Artwork Management processes, AstraZeneca deployed Loftware Smartflow, Loftware’s highly configurable and process-focused Artwork Management solution. They chose the centralized, enterprise-wide Artwork Management solution for its flexible approach, including configurable workflows that would support AstraZeneca’s business procedures.
A major goal for AstraZeneca’s new system was to improve collaboration and effectiveness across their Commercial, Operations and IT departments. To achieve this, they required a solution that supported the fast on-boarding of new entities and end users. For the system to be successful, they needed both internal and external end users to utilize it and follow established business processes. Smartflow’s secure, intuitive and user-friendly interface empowered business users to quickly adopt the solution, incorporating it into their daily activities.
It is important that the Artwork Management system focus on business processes – and that the system adapts to our business process and not the other way around.
Russell Collins
Director Global Labelling Business Process
One of the ways AstraZeneca maintains their leading role in the industry is their focus on the continual improvement of business processes. Custom reports in their previous system could not be modified to meet current needs, limiting their visibility of current operations. With Smartflow’s business intelligence capabilities, they set up dashboards and reports that helped them not only identify bottlenecks but drive process improvements throughout their organization. The reports and dashboards allowed the Global Labeling Business Process team to collect and drill down into data. With this ‘control tower’ approach, they were able to measure the efficiency and quality of their processes across all operations sites, marketing and regulatory departments and external graphics studios.
Accuracy and regulatory compliance are critical to the successful production of artwork packaging in the pharmaceutical industry. For AstraZeneca, Smartflow supported their efforts to improve accuracy and meet global regulations with audit tracking of changes, version control and a centralized Digital Asset Library (DAL) to store the digital content needed for the multiple artworks associated with each product.
