Can pharma learn from auto? Of course!
What do they teach in automobile school that pharmaceuticals can learn? Quite a few lessons, if you look at the challenges they face globally. The drug industry, traditionally growing via medical breakthroughs, is facing threats from unexpected rivals such as Google and Samsung, while the auto sector is grappling with new-age nemeses like Google and Tesla. At the India Pharmaceutical Forum, a gathering of top manufacturing quality executives and regulators in Mumbai last week, Sun Pharma founder Dilip Shanghvi said the pharma industry could take a tutorial from the auto components company Motherson Sumi on quality control and HR management. In 2011, addressing an Indian pharma industry audience, Sir Andrew Witty, the charismatic former CEO of British drug maker GSK, too, had picked an auto example to drive home a few points on how data an...
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The drug industry, traditionally growing via medical breakthroughs, is facing threats from unexpected rivals such as Google and Samsung, while the auto sector is grappling with new-age nemeses like Google and Tesla.
At the India Pharmaceutical Forum, a gathering of top manufacturing quality executives and regulators in Mumbai last week, Sun Pharma founder Dilip Shanghvi said the pharma industry could take a tutorial from the auto components company Motherson Sumi on quality control and HR management.
In 2011, addressing an Indian pharma industry audience, Sir Andrew Witty, the charismatic former CEO of British drug maker GSK, too, had picked an auto example to drive home a few points on how data analytics can aid clinical research and drug discovery.
The Sehgal School
The teacher: Vivek Chaand Sehgal, chairman of Motherson Sumi, who is also on Sun Pharma’s board
The lessons:
- Motherson Sumi’s use of common-sense solutions to supply zero-defect auto components to Toyota in India for over a decade
- The way it manages 50 factories and a workforce of 1.2 million, keeping attrition levels below 2%
- How it has notched 35% year-on- year growth in the last 30 years
The teacher: Formula 1 marquee McLaren
The lessons:
- How to process huge amounts of data in real time; over a typical Grand Prix weekend, the McLaren racing team captures more than a billion data points from 200-plus sensors in each car.
- “What works for the pit wall is also valid in the lab, and so our expertise has been adapted to manage data in medicine discovery research – but also for ‘biotelemetry’ in clinical research,”: A case study on the McLaren website says it all.
