MSD Haarlem · Technical Operations · Internship 2022/2023
What capacity
really costs.
Internship in my third year at MSD (Merck Sharp & Dohme) in Haarlem, in Technical Operations: a GMP environment where vaccines and medicines are packaged. My assignment was to make people, projects and capacity visible, and with it the cost attached to them. Every planning choice in a Capex portfolio is ultimately a choice about money.
Period
Terms 3 & 4 Academic year 2022/2023Department
TechOps Pharmaceutical Technical OperationsPortfolio
30 to 35 projects Parallel GMP Capex projectsAngle
FTE and budget Own capacity versus contractorsPackaging lines that have to keep running while you improve them.
TechOps keeps the packaging lines, utilities and installations available for production and improves them through GMP Capex projects. Every project has to fit into the plant without disrupting operations, and within the budget released for it. If you do not have a sharp view of how people are deployed, you cannot see where that budget leaks away either.
Substantiation
Making hours traceable
Collecting project information and making the deployment per project traceable, so that a Capex request rests on actual figures instead of an estimate.
Staffing
Own people before contractors
Project managers, engineers, qualification engineers and TFS all have their own deadlines. Showing where internal capacity still has room and where it genuinely runs out turns hiring contractors into a substantiated choice rather than a reflex under time pressure.
Priority
What delay is allowed to cost
Built reporting that lets managers see where the load is full, where there is room, and which project can wait without the bill returning somewhere else.
What I learned here.
- Capex and GMP
How an investment decision relates to quality, safety and supply reliability, and what downtime on a packaging line means for the business case behind it.
- The cost of capacity
Set up FTE logic that converts hours into deployment per team, making visible when internal people are full and hiring contractors is genuinely necessary.
- Weighing up systems
Compared ONEPMO, Monday.com and Excel on cost, ease of use and overview, and substantiated that comparison towards management.
- From problem to design
DMADV as the structure from problem definition to functional design, supported by SWOT, MoSCoW, swimlane diagrams and RACI.
- Figures as argument
Reducing conflicting wishes from engineers, project managers and management to a single design, with the planning as the shared source in the conversation about priority and budget.