The pharmaceutical industry is developing groundbreaking drugs that promise to substantially improve patient wellness and quality of life. There are substantial challenges in managing the complexity, cost and cycle time for new drug programs and result in major obstacles to the industry as evidenced by recent declines in pharmaceutical productivity. The presentation outlined elements responsible for the current issues which global cross-functional project teams and organizations must address. Dr. Giesing shared current environmental and operational challenges such as increased disease and technology complexity, escalating product price and lifecycle pressures, R&D pipeline attrition, and effective project risk and cost management. Dr. Giesing also discussed the best practices used to address these challenges such as multi-component optimization, global project plan design and optimization, continuous process improvement, and leading edge approaches to new operations support systems. 


 Eric Davidson provided a demonstration of the GLOWS Project Tracking system that was developed to assist with the many global projects managed by Aventis..