Aristo Pharma (Medinsa)

Medinsa in Madrid, Spain, a group company of Aristo Pharma headquartered in Germany, uses Asprova since 2019 for the end-to-end scheduling of their production of generic drugs.

Medinsa produces in bulk (make-to-stock) drugs in tablet, capsule, and multi-particulate formulations, as well as make-to-order packaging in a big variety of packaging sizes and inscriptions in different languages, which leads to thousands of end products.

The production processes include the weighing of ingredients, granulation, tableting, coating, capsule filling, packaging—with QC after each step. The automatic scheduling with Asprova by 1 key scheduler provides a detailed sequence schedule for all resources (with start/end timing per day, hour, minute, second), accounting for time constraints between processes, including scheduling of regular machine maintenance. Asprova automatically chooses the best among multiple possible available resources.

Of course, with products like drugs or food, observing the first-in/first-out principle is critical as the products have a “best before date.” Asprova also provides traceability: which drug was produced when and on which machine.

Before Asprova was implemented, only weekly scheduling in Excel was possible, needing several schedulers. Now, just one scheduler schedules thousands of orders for a horizon of 24 months daily—with hourly data feedback from their MES to Asprova, and Asprova re-schedules several times a day in only 10 seconds each time.