Installment 3 (and, no, sorry, that is not me)
ISPE announced the Facility of the Year 2007 winners at its annual meeting in Las Vegas.
One of our competitors is part of this competition, but there is room for many awards in this sphere. Excellence is excellence, and the Facility of the Year winners have changed the way they handle facilities operations and engineering projects, particularly Genentech, whose NIMO (for New Idec Manufacturing Operations, if you must go there) project in Oceanside, California, won first place this year.
Teamwork has been essential to the project's success, but also helped the company get through the recent California fires. In accepting the award, Genentech's vice president and general manager of the Oceanside facility, David Broad praised all his colleagues, particularly [apologies if I have misspelled anyone's name] Christophe Label and Victor Vasquez (on the project side), Johannes Robers (who has since left the company), as well as contractors including DPR, CRB Engineering.
"We had three owners and three different processes during the course of this project, but we had great teamwork, " Broad said. Apparently, that teamwork came into play recently during the fires, when one quarter of the company's staff had been evacuated. "Despite challenges, we kept operating," Broad said.
At the opening of the Las Vegas meeting, Clive Mullins, Chair of Facility of the Year committee, announced the competition's groundrules and categories, the winners for 2007 and why they won.
Below, a distillation:
As he said, the awards recognize facilities and projects that use innovative technologies to improve quality and lower production cost. Eligible are any and all pharmaceutical and biopharma facilities that began operation between January 2005 and December 2006"¦ new freestanding facilities, additions, or interior renovations.
Overall categories are:
- Process Innovation
- Project Execution
- Equipment Innovation
- Facility Integraton
- Energy Efficiency
- Operational Excellence