AstraZeneca Pharmaceutical (Wuxi) Co., Ltd.

• Company Profile

AstraZeneca Pharmaceutical (Wuxi) Co., Ltd. is a production base established by AstraZeneca in Wuxi in 1993. As the company's first entry point into the Chinese market, it has now developed into the largest packaging and production supply base in the Asia-Pacific region, supplying over 20 brands of medicines to more than 70 markets worldwide. In 2024, its Wuxi Supply Base was recognized as a "Lighthouse Factory" by the World Economic Forum. In 2025, the company broke ground on a new small molecule drug factory with an investment of US$475 million, further consolidating its position as a strategic core of AstraZeneca in China.

• Project Background

While experiencing rapid development, AstraZeneca Pharmaceutical (Wuxi) Co., Ltd. also faces many challenges and difficulties: management efficiency has hit a bottleneck, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is relatively low, and no suitable solutions have been found. This project focuses on improving the two major pain points and difficulties: operational efficiency and equipment capacity utilization.

• Project Process

Over a period of five months, the RIO project team, together with the AstraZeneca Wuxi project team members, conducted a comprehensive review of the management processes related to the pain points. The main contents included:

1. Optimized the company's entire value chain and business organizational structure, forming a clear matrix diagram for organization and resource allocation.

2. Established end-to-end processes for production operations management.

3. Improved management efficiency through process reengineering or optimization, and enhanced authorization, internal control, risk management, etc., to maximize overall efficiency.

4. Established a performance evaluation standard system to measure the company's operational performance, using quantifiable data for scientific and effective assessment.

5. Taught and imparted a set of self-driven and self-improving management tools and methods to evaluate the performance level of one's own business and identify improvement points and opportunities.

• Implementation Results

1. Designed and optimized an organization that matches the company's forward-looking strategic development.

2. Established a BSC-KPI performance management system based on processes and data.

3. The company's output value per capita increased by 18%.

4. Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) increased by 12%.

5. On-time delivery rate increased by 23%.