Pfizer's strategy is good medicine: Drug Packager of the Year - Special: Prizer Inc. corporate profile - Cover Story

Food & Drug Packaging, Dec, 2003 by Lisa McTigue Pierce, Pan Demetrakakes, Christopher Barry

To get to the top, you sometimes have to follow more than one path.

Pfizer Inc. has deftly followed several paths to the pinnacle of the world's pharmaceutical market: acquiring leading competitors, developing blockbuster products, taking advantage of favorable regulations (often after lobbying for them). Packaging has been an indispensable part of Pfizer's journey. That's why Food & Drug Packaging has named Pfizer its 2003 Drug Packager of the Year.

Smooth integration of packaging operations has been integral to the absorption of Pharmacia, Warner-Lambert and other former rivals. Innovative packaging has sped the acceptance of over-the-counter medicine and consumer products like Listerine PocketPaks. Judicious presentation of physicians' samples has helped introduce new medicines and impart correct information about them to doctors and patients.

It all adds up to the No. 1 pharmaceutical company in the world. Pfizer's $45 billion in sales puts it 32% above its nearest rival, GlaxoSmithKline.

Pfizer now markets eight of the world's top 25 medicines, including impotence medication Viagra, cholesterol reducer Lipitor (the world's best-selling medicine), antidepressant Zoloft and pain medication Celebrex. More than a dozen Pfizer medications are at the top of their respective therapeutic categories.

Pfizer also has a huge chunk of the over-the-counter (OTC) market, including popular allergy medications Benadryl and Sudafed, as well as a substantial business in veterinary medicine.

Getting all these products reliably packaged, designing the packaging, staying on top of packaging regulations and performing many other related tasks is an ongoing challenge.

"It's a pretty big scope when you think about the number of businesses and the number of [manufacturing] sites that we support," says Rich Hollander, senior director of packaging services. "There were 9,500 pieces of artwork that were created or revised last year across these three businesses [prescription medicine, consumer products and animal products]. That gives you a sense of the level of activity that we're supporting."

New organization

Pfizer's huge variety of products demands a lot of packaging diversity. Hollander estimates that the number of stock keeping units (SKUs) supported by sites within the U.S. numbers more than 2,500. With the acquisition of Pharmacia, more than 5,400 packaging bills of materials and 8,500 package specification revisions are revised annually in support of these SKUs.

Keeping all this packaging activity in synch with the rest of Pfizer is the job of the Packaging Services group, headed by Hollander. The mission of Packaging Services is to provide operational support and leadership in all areas of package development to Pfizer's manufacturing sites as well as other internal customers such as marketing, research and development and regulatory affairs.

"In the end, we design, develop and qualify the packages Pfizer produces," he says. That includes graphic elements, legal issues for labeling, structural design, specifications, material testing and qualification, and more.

Packaging Services has recently undergone an organizational change in the wake of the Pharmacia acquisition. It now is organized into five functional areas: global package technology; U.S. package engineering services; and three package design and development groups which are focused on the three businesses Pfizer supports.

The global package technology team within Packaging Services has three main areas of responsibility.

One focuses on strategic initiatives as well as use of emerging technologies, such as radio-frequency identification and anti-counterfeiting technologies.

A second team focuses on supporting Pfizer's consumer health care business needs for primary container/closure systems.

A third team provides package testing services by way of a 3,000-square-foot facility in Morris Plains, N.J. The package testing center evaluates and qualifies all container/closure systems the company uses and also performs distribution testing for the finished goods that are shipped, ensuring they will withstand the rough handling which often occurs.

One of the biggest responsibilities of the three package design and development groups is reconciling the packaging needs and desires of marketing with those of manufacturing. That isn't always easy.

The U.S. Package Engineering Services group serves as the main link between the design and development teams and the sites. As the U.S. has 11 packaging sites, plus numerous contract packagers, the package engineers are physically located within regions of the U.S. (New Jersey, Michigan and Puerto Rico.) They serve to support the "site driven" activities--that is, component changes, packaging equipment or tooling design changes, quality and cost improvement initiatives and more.

The group also works on the receiving end of new product introductions as they support necessary line trials and ultimately approve their structural designs.

Alignment is a goal: "We're very focused on insuring that the sites are aligned to the same or similar technologies, and that packages are designed so they can run at multiple sites without any significant changes," Hollander says.