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Read Adam Jordan's insights on how Bryden Wood’s award-winning 'Design to Value' approach delivered two FOYA-winning pharmaceutical facilities that set new standards for innovation, efficiency, and collaboration.
In the world of pharmaceutical facility design, the ISPE FOYA Awards are the pinnacle of industry achievement. Setting the global standard for excellence in design, construction and operation, the award is given to the latest technologies and innovations improving project outcomes and enhancing patients’ lives.
Bryden Wood has been a design team partner for two FOYA award-winning projects in quick succession, first in 2020 for an Attachment Inhibitor project in Parma, Italy, and again in 2024 for a Pfizer API manufacturing plant in Singapore.
These projects were significantly different in form, conception and function, but common threads in the design and delivery approach helped both to achieve success and industry recognition.
This new API (active pharmaceutical ingredient) manufacturing plant is a flagship facility for Pfizer’s regional network, a $1bn SGD investment covering almost 430,000 square feet and delivered entirely during the COVID-19 pandemic. The facility needed to represent best practice in GMP (good manufacturing practice) and digital automation while remaining cost-effective to build and operate.
Bryden Wood was engaged to review and optimize a previously developed concept design for the site’s dry processing (milling and sieving) building. We worked closely with client stakeholders to analyze the root process requirements, identify over-provisions in the proposed design, and consolidate production onto less equipment.
Capturing these root requirements in 3D digital models called “Chips” (sets of interacting components) allowed us to rapidly evaluate a wide range of configuration options with client stakeholders engaged every step of the way.
The reduced equipment requirements allowed us to pivot away from the originally proposed central spine corridor towards a simpler configuration of process rooms with perimeter circulation on both sides. This, coupled with extensive deployment of glazing, allowed us to bring natural light to both circulation and process areas, enhancing the workplace environment and employee wellbeing.
Our alternative design for the milling building reduced operational CO2 emissions by more than 50% and capital cost by 30%. It was adopted by Pfizer and incorporated into the delivered scheme. “The layout, space and light in the milling building is superb,” said Pfizer’s Senior Director of Operations.
The Singapore API plant is the 2024 FOYA Category Winner for Operations, Project Execution. This is thanks to the whole project team's successful delivery of a large and complex project ahead of schedule and under budget during a global pandemic.
Aiming to introduce manufacturing capability into GSK’s Parma site for Fostemsavir (a life-saving HIV drug for patients with limited or no other treatment options available), this project’s brief was ambitious.
To maintain supply while the drug was in development and clinical trials, GSK had to build and commission a brand new facility in a shorter timeframe than had ever been achieved before.
As lead designer, Bryden Wood formed a collaborative team with external partners and client representatives to capture functional requirements in “Chip” models that could be rapidly configured to allow many design options to be evaluated in a short time.
The ability to undertake rapid digital optioneering was particularly important as forecast demand volumes were uncertain and clinical manufacturing requirements for the drug were still being developed during the design phase. We developed a capacity model in-house to inform decisions around unit operations and scale.
The final design concept was deliberately simple. Process spaces were housed on a single level, raised above the ground to meet flood protection requirements. A technical floor was located above the process. Offsite modular prefabrication helped improve program delivery.
Working alongside local stakeholders to ensure the viability of delivery in Italy, we overlapped design, procurement and construction activities to prioritize elements of the build according to variables like complexity and long-lead-time equipment.
Rigorous interrogation of the design at each stage helped ensure construction and commissioning was completed on budget and within a very tight schedule: 15 months from groundbreaking to handover of the fully finished facility.
The project was one of two FOYA Category Winners for Social Impact in 2020. “The team paid attention to creating a ‘can do’ attitude and culture whilst implementing accelerated delivery tools,” said the FOYA Judging Panel. “As a result, GSK and ViiV Healthcare ensured the continuity of supply of Fostemsavir for clinical trials.”
Although the two projects are quite different, the underlying principles of our responses are the same. Design to Value is our unifying approach to finding the most efficient route to the optimal solution by analyzing and understanding every facet of a problem.
In both projects we took a methodical approach to building a thorough understanding of the process, breaking it down into its component parts, considering these from every angle, and configuring them in the optimal way to meet the project’s unique challenges: supplying a new life-saving drug in the shortest time possible, or delivering a best-in-class API plant on time and budget during a pandemic.
Both the Parma Attachment Inhibitor and Singapore API Plant were highly complex projects with many stakeholders and technical challenges to overcome. Collaboration and engagement with the client in an open, exploratory way was critical to managing this complexity.
Much contemporary design practice seeks to reduce complexity through specialization –fragmenting responsibility until nobody has a clear view of the whole. Our approach was to embrace this complexity, viewing it through the lens of value drivers to find and bridge the gap between the existing and desired state.
As explained in our book Design to Value, “each project is unique, but an ethos and approach prevail. You focus on what you want the project to do, how it should best function and who it should serve - rather than a specific material outcome.”
This may sound obvious but it’s a long way from what often happens. Client briefs by nature tend to be quite detailed and prescriptive, with the designer’s role limited to converting the brief into a good design with deviation from the brief discouraged. It was only by challenging the brief and focusing instead on value, and the barriers to value, that we were able to achieve the best possible outcome for our clients.
Our involvement in two recent FOYA award-winning projects is a testament to both the commitment of our team and the transformational impacts that Design to Value can bring.
Learn more about our recent projects here.
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