Case Studies - Eli Lilly

“Ongoing commitment to a structured maintenance policy has had a thoroughly positive impact on the company culture.”

Eli Lilly and Company Limited is an affiliate of Eli Lilly Company in Indianapolis, Indiana and one of the UK’s leading research based pharmaceutical manufacturing comp­anies, with an R&D center in Windlesham, Surrey, manufacturing sites in Basingstoke and Speke, and a distribution center that exports medicines to many parts of the world.

The UK arm won the Queen’s Award for International Trade in 1974, 1996 and 2001 and the Queen’s Award for Innovation in 2000. The Basingstoke operation opened in 1939, and the site is still dominated by the elegant original building that overlooks the railway line, which was its main connection to the outside world. As well as the UK sales and marketing and IT teams, 450 people work on the manufacturing and packaging of more than 50 different named products at anyone time.

Manufacturing drugs is a highly regulated and precise undertaking – and that precision is also essential in their packing, which has to conform to the many different legal and cultural requirements of the countries to which they are exported. Production runs can be short, and it is not unusual for the setup of complex packaging lines to be changed several times in a week. Maintenance is an important issue, not just with regard to keeping down cost, but keeping up to tight schedules.

And maintenance at Basingstoke has become a matter of pride. The statistics tell the story. From 1997 to date, conformance to weekly maintenance planning schedule has improved from 0%to 95%. Since December 2000, the rolling 12-month mean time between failures (MTBF) on key packaging lines has increased from about 40 hours to about 70 hours. In the same period, the rolling 12-month MTBF on key air conditioning systems has increased from about 800 hours to about 1800 hours. One result is that overdue work orders have decreased since January 2001 from more than 100 per month to fewer than ten.

How has this been achieved? By sustained effort over time. Until about ten years ago, there was no planned maintenance policy in place. In 1997, an engineering strategy project was started to work toward achieving a world-class maintenance program that would deliver higher efficiencies and fewer breakdowns. The initiatives were packaging led; manufacturing and utilities soon followed. Now there is a life­cycle approach, starting with consideration of the maintenance implication of all equipment before it is purchased. Project groups specify requirements - targets include reliability and availability of spares. This ongoing commitment to a structured maintenance policy has had a thoroughly positive impact on the company culture: maintenance is now felt to be everybody’s business. Maintenance data is carefully collected and analyzed, tasks that are easier since Basingstoke upgraded to Eli Lilly’s corporate computer system.

Between 1997 and 2000, the overall site scores for the Asset Management Information Service (AMIS) audit have risen steadily from 41% to 68%.