Case Study: Major International Pharmaceutical Company achieves automated 4‑week production scheduling and real-time plant-wide visibility with Access Group

Day-to-day production scheduling in an international pharmaceutical company

Major International Pharmaceutical Company, a global vaccine and self-injected prescription medicine manufacturer, faced highly complex 24/7 production with multiple trains, shared resources and hundreds of discrete activities. Daily scheduling was manual and labor-intensive—seven planners maintained separate Excel spreadsheets that produced only a one-week rolling plan and required a whole morning to update. To address this, the company implemented Access Group’s Orchestrate Planning and Scheduling software.

Access Group configured Orchestrate to automate and consolidate scheduling, integrate ERP-driven maintenance and calibration tasks, and provide plant-wide visibility via touchscreens and user screens. As a result, the rolling plan now covers four weeks instead of one, the daily scheduling run takes about an hour instead of a morning, fewer schedulers are required, maintenance is rescheduled into non-production slots, and shift changeovers are significantly smoother—delivering a real-time “single version of the truth” across the facility.