Indian pharmaceutical industry despite its advanced automation installations needs workforce management solutions to maximise productivity, minimise compliance risk and control labour costs, said James Thomas, Country Manager, Kronos Systems India.
 
Going by the compliance and audit challenges in drug manufacturing, where batch to batch accuracy is critical, there is need for visibility of operations to keep global regulatory observations at bay, he added.  It is clearly imminent that there are visible gaps in terms of people being involved in the processes in the Indian pharma industry. The cGMP and CFR Part 21 regulations are all about connecting people into the processes where the compliance framework is all about traceability and audits, Thomas told Pharmabiz.
 
Now the challenges in Indian pharma are on questions related to audit where global regulators assert for revamp of the existing processes. Pharma leadership teams indicated two serious issues: One is the visibility in real-time of what is going on in a production plant. The second is data traceability to gauge what has happened and how and when the error the product contamination took place, he added.

In order to stall regulatory observation issues, drive business outcomes Indian pharma majors are convinced there is need for visibility across its operations to make certain processes are in place before an adverse event occurs.  Moreover US companies which outsource research and manufacture to India, insist on employee details of those working at the production plant for their drugs.

Now Kronos is a global leader with a slew of software solutions in workforce management to connect the entire employees in a company. From Abbot, Allergan, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, to Perrigo, Teva, Forrest Labs, Valeant, Pfizer, Dr. Reddy’s Labs and Johnson & Johnson are customers of Kronos.
 
“We are a leader in the people supply chain for shop floors enabling companies to manage the employees and determine the life cycle of human resources. However pharma sector in India has a long way to go for the skill- pay-trade off to reach an inflection point but is on our radar as we are closely watching this sector. Advanced deliberations are on and companies have already indicated to the global audit teams that they will go with Kronos for people and process management,” stated Thomas.
 
Any company which realises that manpower tracking is a supercritical area in business operations requires to deploy workforce management solutions to placing the right trained workforce at appropriate locations in the plant, handle situations during employee absenteeism, gauge performance to he said.
 
Indian industry in general takes an oversimplified view of worker engagement and think they are easily replaceable. Instead it is critical engage the workers and we are looking at targeted return on investment (ROI) for the pharma industry where workforce management is key for Indian pharma to propel compliance adherence and succeed in global audits, stated Thomas.