Japanese chemical manufacturer

Background

When it comes to managing life-saving trial drugs accuracy is paramount, and not even one mistake can be made.
Company A, a Japanese chemical manufacturer, needed to store a large shipment of trial drugs.

However, their management and storage had severe issues: there was no relation to the attached drug number, there were no source markings from the drug trial, and attaching barcodes to the drugs was impossible. As they tried to avoid human error, the company felt that they had reached the limits to how smoothly they could manage the inventory.

Proposals

How can one manage an inventory of several tens of thousands of boxes while reducing human error to zero? Our answer was to adopt a voice recognition system for inventory management and for picking items from the inventory. With this system, workers no longer had to spend lots of time consulting a list for complex picking work; since they had both hands free they did not need to temporarily put down the list or the product somewhere, and their work became faster and more accurate.

Outcome

• Achieving a zero error rate for inputting and shipping
• Using various off-the-shelf drug trial management systems, we made the process even more rational.
• Linking up with IWRS, a trial drug delivery management system, we were also able to speed up the distribution process.