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Pharma and Biotech
Pharma and Biotech
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Optima Pharma’s support service is undergoing reorganization to boost customer satisfaction even more. We have consolidated all of our service areas across all of our sites. Now customers worldwide have a central contact for all issues in the form of a Service Account Manager who coordinates the back-office teams. The individual Optima Pharma sites continue growing together as “OneTeam“.
2022 was a highly successful year for Optima Pharma. The integrated turnkey process, CSPE (Comprehensive Scientific Process Engineering), cuts the time to production start-up for filling lines. It has had a very positive take-up in the marketplace. Worldwide, the number of machines in operation has continued to grow. The service presence has also grown, with the new service hub opening in Raleigh, North Carolina, as one example. Even more than before, Optima Pharma is perceived by customers as a strategic partner for total systems that include technologies for filling and closing, for isolators, and freeze-drying. Hence work has focused on the service portfolio over the last year. What came out of this was a thoughtfully designed, target-group-specific program called “Lifetime Production Readiness.”
Our customers will clearly have the sense that we are one team and are working hand in hand on a product.
Holger Burgermeister, Service Director at Optima Pharma, explains, “The next step in our overall strategy is the collective, coordinated ongoing development of the service areas.” That is why throughout 2023, Optima Pharma is now creating core teams for the following service areas: Customer Care, Maintenance Support, Competence Team, Qualification and Validation, and Business Development /Processes. These teams work in close collaboration across locations and with foreign subsidiaries. Optima Pharma’s filling and closing technologies are created at its headquarters in Schwäbisch Hall, decontamination technologies and isolators originate in Radolfzell, and freeze-drying technology comes from Gladenbach-Mornshausen. One central Service Account Manager is in place to coordinate the customer’s
requests on all line items with these teams. Burgermeister says, “This is a response to our customers’ desire to have a leading point of contact and leads to increased satisfaction.”
The cross-location service strategy provides the turnkey concept with an even broader scope. The new service strategy accompanies increased inter-nationalization. Burgermeister points out, “This is a significant advantage for our customers. Optima Pharma mainly has its own personnel in the markets.” This means that service staff often work directly on site on the customer’s premises or out of an Optima Service Hub and are in close contact with customers. Holger Burgermeister is responsible for the cross-location area of “Business Development/Processes” and supports the development of the global service structure.
Customer support is centralized through Manuel Müller, Group Leader of Customer Support at Optima Pharma. His area covers project management, project planning, and worldwide customer support. “The reorganization aims to provide customers with a target-group oriented, coordinated service portfolio for filling machines, isolators and freeze-dryers, one that meets their high expectations of lifetime production readiness,” says Manuel Müller regarding the restructuring of the service areas. “In the future, customer requests will be projected and processed in line with defined standards for the entire turnkey line. For quotations and order processing, we work as OneTeam, aiming to deliver real added value to our customers,” says Müller. Our customer service is now being structured worldwide in line with this philosophy so that both the needs of local one-off projects and global turnkey projects are met.
“Our leading points of contact are operating globally, so they are usually in the same time zone, making them much more available to our clients,” says Müller. “Our staff’s greater availability ensures that our customer’s requirements can be coordinated more quickly and locally, but without sacrificing the link to the technical departments based in Germany.” To this end, service employees receive unified training via cross-location qualification programs, ensuring the same standard of training worldwide.
Matthias Staus, Group Leader of Service at Optima Pharma, heads up Maintenance Support. This service area schedules preventive and status-based maintenance work at customers’ sites. When asked about the benefits of the new service strategy, the answer is clear: “We are able to offer our customers proactive spare part and maintenance strategies across multiple sites,” says Matthias Staus. This standardization results in coordinated recommendations for replacement and worn parts for the entire plant, uniform performance descriptions, and a single quotation from a single point of contact. Service calls for the different line components can be better coordinated. “Our team is coming even closer together, and colleagues can benefit from the expertise and experience of their team members,” says Staus confidently.
Ronny Wiske, Group Leader of Life Cycle Services at Optima Pharma, will be responsible in the future for the Competence Team area across all locations. This department focuses on support services for the systems and troubleshooting. “In the event of malfunctions at the entire plant, customers can expect that troubleshooting will be easy, documented, and coordinated. Our team is positioned to analyze and resolve complex, crossproduct incidents jointly. To this end, unified procedures are followed, both in the choice of remote tools and methodology. The reorganization has enabled us to successfully use synergies and lessons learned for further installations in the field and in our new projects,” says Wiske. “By standardizing our tools and processes in Germany, with the organization in place overseas, and by having experts on the ground, we are learning together and becoming even more effective in handling all of our customer’s needs,” Wiske adds.
We are able to offer our customers proactive spare part and maintenance strategies.
Andreas Milich, the Radolfzell-based Service Director, is responsible for qualification and validation across all sites. The same principle holds true in his area: One team, one approach, one qualified system for the customer. “When it comes to qualification and validation, we are continuing to embrace the CSPE 2.0 approach and are bringing the expertise of all our sites together even more effectively,” Milich explains. All the qualification documents come from a single source, and indepth internal coordination means that extensive parts of the qualification process can be handled seamlessly during continuous plant operation. Also, customers benefit from this coordinated approach using resources like calibration materials. “This makes the CSPE 2.0 an all-around trouble-free package in terms of qualification and validation, too,” says Milich. Employees receive intensive training to prepare them for the new organization.
