West Celebrates the One-Year Anniversary of Integrated Solutions

West is now celebrating the one-year anniversary of its Integrated Solutions initiative, known as Simplify the Journey™. Throughout 2019, we socialized the program through marketing materials and face-to-face conversations with customers. Now it’s time to reflect on the lessons we’ve learned — and to look forward to the opportunities on the horizon.

As injectable medicines have evolved, customers have expressed a need for partners that can offer a more holistic approach encompassing the entire lifecycle of an injectable medicine, from early clinical development to commercialization. The Integrated Solutions initiative from West, now celebrating its one-year anniversary, does exactly that, bringing together West’s primary packaging, device, analytical, regulatory and contract manufacturing expertise in a single-source solution.

A New Approach for All Customers

The Integrated Solutions initiative elevates West’s role as a partner and collaborator. Our goal is to complement, not duplicate, the functional capabilities of our customers. This enables them to focus on their core competencies while relying on West for services they may not have or plan to have inhouse. As such, with Integrated Solutions in place, we can offer something to every customer, regardless of their size or where their products sit in the development lifecycle.

According to Jennifer Riter, Senior Director, Analytical Services, “We always knew smaller pharma companies could benefit from this type of bundled solution because they simply don’t have the internal resources to accommodate the full range of services West offers. But we were excited to learn how many larger companies were willing, even eager, to engage us in conversations about how we could help.”

The willingness of customers to engage about an Integrated Solutions approach is directly related to the changes and challenges taking place across the industry. “There are a number of trends driving drug and device manufacturing,” Riter points out. “The continued focus on combination products, as well as many pipelines containing complex molecules, are just a few examples.” As companies struggle to respond to these drivers, they face gaps in experience and knowledge. “Integrated Solutions affords West the opportunity to fill these gaps, to leverage the expertise we’ve acquired over nearly 100 years of manufacturing containers, closures and delivery devices for injectable medicines.”