Supply Chain Design of Continuous Tablet Manufacturing Facilties Using Discrete Event Simulation

In the pharmaceutical industry, continuous manufacturing is becoming an attractable alternative to batch processing as the demand for small volume market specific products increases. However, the potential supply chain benefits of continuous manufacturing are difficult to quantify and vary significantly under different market conditions. In addition, to realize the full benefits of continuous manufacturing, changes to traditional production planning will need to be made. To address uncertainty, a discrete event simulation model was developed to inform the supply chain design of products and tablet manufacturing facilities. The outputs from the model define the product, market, and production planning conditions best suited for a continuous manufacturing or batch process platform. This ultimately enables a mechanism for identifying products and tablet manufacturing facilities that are a good fit for a continuous manufacturing platform as well as informing the production planning strategy.