Overview
A biotech company manufactures amino acids and other solutions for delivery to pharmaceutical companies, which uses these inputs in larger drug-manufacturing operations. The problem for this company was substantial contamination rates at the end of long-lead production batches, each of which was unrecoverable at a cost of $150,000 per batch.The company performed several failure analyses, including a standard root cause and corrective action procedure, but no assignable causes could be identified. Therefore, the manufacturer turned to TRIZ, which yielded a solution.