Things Life Sciences Can Absorb from Consumer-Packaged Goods

As the life sciences industry tends to become more competitive and societal demands to lower healthcare costs rise, CPG methods and techniques to reduce packaging costs can be applied to the sector to meet these goals.

FREMONT, CA: One is now starting to see some of the leading drivers in the CPG sector gaining prominence in the life sciences industry. Sustainability has begun to collapse within the design priorities of life science packaging, and cost control is becoming a significant consideration for life science packaging. Reducing the cost of products has long been a top concern in the Consumer-Packaged Goods (CPG) market, but there is a lot that the life sciences sector may be able to glean from the cost reduction measures applied in other sectors.

Industries will (and should) benefit from each other. For example, the pharmaceutical industry has been pioneering serialization and monitoring and tracking, motivated by regulatory needs. The food and beverage industry is currently capitalizing on what the pharmaceutical industry has learned from serialization. The same can be valid with savings in packaging prices. As the life sciences industry tends to become more competitive and societal demands to lower healthcare costs rises, CPG methods and techniques to reduce packaging costs can be applied to the sector to meet these goals.

Below are various fields in which life sciences might minimize expenses that they are not considering right now. Those areas include:

• Components and products strategies.

• Printing

• Materials

• Production

• Strategic cost saving.

• Increase production and minimize loss.

• Consolidation and standardization.

• Design for efficiency.

• Packaging ownership.

• Strategy implementation.

Although the need to reduce packaging costs in life sciences may never be as extreme as it is in the CPG industry, the need to reduce costs is still critical and will continue to increase. Increased generic drugs, market pressure on prices, and the need to appease shareholders can emphasize packaging cost management. As other drivers have shown, learning from first-time movers and applying those lessons is an easier way to achieve these new goals. Why not look at the methods used by CPG to see how they can be implemented to accomplish better the pharmaceutical industry's changing priorities and aims?