What are critical strategic obstacles for global companies? One prominent challenge in a global company´s strategy is ensuring timely project roadmap planning while avoiding potential capacity or resource bottlenecks.
This case study explores how SCHOTT Pharma, a pioneer in pharmaceutical drug containment solutions and delivery systems, leverages smart AI tools to align their strategic project roadmap planning with their capacity allocation to deliver on their promises.
Let’s think of this process as having reached a perfect balance between the company´s offer (human resource capacity for specific roles) and demand (projects or service & support needs), thanks to the support of a smart AI assistant.
What kind of digital solutions are being used? How do they help SCHOTT Pharma enhance their capacity-based strategic project roadmapping?
About SCHOTT Pharma.
SCHOTT Pharma designs solutions grounded in science to ensure that medications are safe and easy to use for people around the world. The portfolio comprises drug containment solutions and delivery systems for injectable drugs ranging from prefillable glass and polymer syringes to cartridges, vials, and ampoules.
Every day, a team of over 4,600 people from over 60 nations works at SCHOTT Pharma to contribute to global healthcare. The company is represented in all main pharmaceutical hubs, with 16 manufacturing sites in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. With over 1,000 patents and technologies developed in-house and a state-of-the-art R&D center in Switzerland, the company is focused on developing innovations for the future, serving over 1,800 customers, including the top 30 leading pharma manufacturers.
The Challenge.
As SCHOTT Pharma grew, balancing strategic project roadmap planning with potential capacity constraints became increasingly complex.
They needed a solution that could:
- Capture their extensive organizational structure in context,
- Link their organizational hierarchy to planned projects,
- Compare the total availability of specific roles and human resources against overall project needs,
- Identify potential resource shortages leading to potential project delays before they occur,
- Intuitively visualize the allocation of specific roles and human resources,
- Enable users with easy-to-use features to evaluate the impact of countermeasures addressing capacity bottlenecks,
- Be scalable to future growth.
The Solution.
ValueMiner proved to be the innovative, flexible, and user-friendly solution for SCHOTT Pharma´s needs.
Our Capacity-based strategic roadmapping module allows managers to store data in context, visualize resource allocation and project demands, strategically plan projects according to optimized role allocation, and proactively identify bottlenecks for effective countermeasures.
Capacity Bottleneck – Scenario 1: staff augmentation.
By visualizing the dependencies between project needs, deliveries, timelines and resources, SCHOTT Pharma can determine whether they have the necessary workforce or need additional staff or contract employees to meet their targets and goals.
Together, we developed an intelligent tool that:
- Visualizes resource allocation with a smart traffic light system (available, booked, overbooked).
- Visually alerts on resource shortages (for what role, for what human resource, in what project, for what period).
- Provides easy-to-use features to adjust capacity allocation over time automatically.
Capacity Bottleneck – Scenario 2: restructuring workload.
In addition to the features mentioned above, the ValueMiner AI-powered Capacity Management module offers a convenient drag-and-drop option for shifting projects´ deadlines with just one click, updating capacity utilization in real-time even before saving the change.
This empowers managers to confidently explore alternative scenarios without hesitation, such as reprioritizing projects to avoid the need for new staff members while ensuring promises are still met.
Software vs. spreadsheets.
However, would it be possible to do capacity-based strategic project planning with Excel? Yes, it would.
But – we wondered – are spreadsheets the best way to do it? No, they are not.
Spreadsheets, like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, are readily available on most computers, eliminating the need for additional software purchases.
Nevertheless, they often struggle to handle complex data interdependencies, which affects transparency heavily.
As stand-alone files, spreadsheets also make centralized data management difficult.
Additionally, with spreadsheets´ data updates and changes often require lengthy manual input, leading to potential errors.
Finally, maintaining extensive spreadsheets is time-consuming and slows down processes.
Software key benefits.
By embracing the intelligent ValueMiner solution, SCHOTT Pharma has gained:
- A single source of truth. The system provides consolidated data and intuitive visualization for better decision-making.
- Real-time insights. ValueMiner helps SCHOTT Pharma to swiftly detect capacity bottlenecks using real-time data. With just one click, users can spot and analyze these constraints, planning effective countermeasures.
- Improved transparency. ValueMiner´s graph data model, which runs behind the scenes of our software, effortlessly combines data from various sources, letting SCHOTT Pharma see their data always in context.
- Optimized problem-solving. SCHOTT Pharma´s managers can now predict issues in advance and plan actions before they become critical.
- Increased process and resource efficiency. SCHOTT Pharma benefits from streamlined workflows and maximized workforce utilization.
- Reduced costs and saved time. The smart ValueMiner Capacity-Based Strategic Project Roadmapping module enables users to identify and cut unnecessary costs linked to inefficient workforce allocation, inefficient hiring of additional workforce, or project delays.
SCHOTT Pharma´s case study showcases the critical role of aligning strategic project planning with efficient capacity management.
By leveraging the AI-driven ValueMiner software platform, SCHOTT Pharma has optimized its resource allocation, reduced costs, and ensured goal achievement.
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