With 16 years of chemical engineering experience under his belt, Vinay Sharma has spent 11 of those at Teva api. He’s now General Manager for the Malanpur site in India, and loves the freedom he has to challenge the traditional approach.
I consider myself lucky because I’ve worked at 3 Teva locations, in 6 positions. I started off as a process engineer at the Gajraula site, and then spent 7 wonderful years in technology transfer and operational excellence in Malanpur. After that, I worked at the Head Office in Greater Noida for 2 years as a supply chain lead for India. Six months ago, I received a new assignment to lead site operations at the Malanpur site. It’s been an exciting journey so far and I’m proud of all my achievements to date.
I’m responsible for the output of 20 products at the Malanpur site. One product is an intermediate and the rest are APIs. We’re in the synthetic business, and the majority of our products are sartans and statins, that have very tough competition. In Malanpur, every day is interesting and challenging.
Our output is enormous. We are currently working 70 customers in 30 countries. We dispatch 4-5 orders per week, which is close to 250 to 300 metric tons per annum of APIs dispatched all over the world.
The pandemic was a real ‘acid test’ for us. We couldn’t just stop production. We were very aware that many people were waiting for us for this medicine. We had to take proactive decisions based on prioritization. We had to decide, together with the Supply Chain and Commercial teams, what were the top products needed at that moment and then run only with them. And not only did we do it, but we met all expectations. Our reliability was at close to 96%, meaning what we promised to our customers reached them in 96% of cases.
Our field is highly “VUCA”! This stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguity. Every day we’re dealing with changes. Sometimes we need to boost or drop production rates at an instant, due to demand fluctuations or competitiveness. Our agility helps us absorb any challenge we encounter. The show must always go on! We need to support our business, patients and customers the right way.
Everyone has 24 hours in their day. I spend most of my 24 hours trying to challenge myself and my teammates. We cannot just continue to do the same thing and expect outstanding results.
And in my spare time, I play cricket! We even have company cricket tournaments every winter.
