We transformed the client’s production scheduling to dramatically improve operational agility. By empowering their planners with an antifragile production strategy, we reduced throughput loss and improved the speed and effectiveness of their response to inevitable shop-floor disruptions.
Executive Brief
The Challenge: AstraZeneca’s long-range strategic production planning was constrained by a fragmented and manual Excel-based process. This created a fragile system, slow to react to market volatility and unable to provide the data-driven confidence needed for multi-billion-pound investment decisions. The key business risk was inefficient capital allocation and a potential inability to meet future global demand in a complex, uncertain environment.
The Solution: Decision Lab partnered with AstraZeneca in a deeply collaborative engagement to co-create a dynamic simulation twin of their global manufacturing network. This unified, web-based platform integrates three powerful simulation models (Portfolio, Demand, and Capacity) into a single, seamless user experience. By automating data flows and enabling rapid, sophisticated scenario analysis, the solution replaced a reactive process with a proactive, strategic capability.
The Outcome: The partnership delivered an antifragile production strategy, empowering AstraZeneca to not just withstand uncertainty, but to gain advantage from it. The platform achieved a high System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 75.0, ensuring strong adoption. The company can now model complex “what-if” scenarios in a fraction of the time, turning strategic planning into a source of competitive advantage and ensuring confident, optimised decision-making for the next decade.
Building an Antifragile Future: How AstraZeneca Partnered with Decision Lab to Revolutionise Production Strategy
The pharmaceutical landscape is defined by volatility—patent cliffs, pipeline uncertainties, and fluctuating global demand. For a leader like AstraZeneca, navigating this requires more than just resilience; it demands an antifragile strategy. An antifragile system is one that doesn’t just resist shocks, but learns and improves from them. Faced with the limitations of traditional, static planning tools, AstraZeneca partnered with Decision Lab to transform their long-range production and capacity planning, embedding agility and data-driven confidence into the core of their global operations. This partnership moved them beyond simple forecasting towards a future-proofed manufacturing network designed to thrive on uncertainty.
The Challenge: From Reactive Planning to Proactive Strategy
AstraZeneca’s existing strategic planning process relied on a complex web of disconnected, manually-intensive spreadsheets. This approach was not only slow but also dangerously susceptible to data inconsistencies and errors, making it difficult to model future uncertainties effectively. The process involved multiple stakeholders across different business units and partner organisations, each with their own data and assumptions, making alignment a significant challenge.
Answering critical “what-if” questions—such as the impact of a clinical trial success, a change in the R&D pipeline, or a supply chain disruption—was a time-consuming ordeal that could take weeks. This reactive posture created significant business risk, potentially leading to inefficient capital allocation, delayed product launches, and a fragile manufacturing network unable to adapt quickly to market shocks or seize emerging opportunities. The need was clear: a fundamental shift from a rigid, retrospective process to a dynamic, forward-looking strategic capability that could provide a single source of truth for the entire organisation.
The Partnership & Solution: A Collaborative Simulation Twin
Decision Lab’s philosophy is built on strategic partnership. We embedded a dedicated team of simulation, software, and AI experts to work in close, agile collaboration with key stakeholders from AstraZeneca and their partners, including GSK. This ensured the solution was not just technically robust, but also deeply aligned with their commercial and operational goals. Through iterative development and continuous user feedback, we co-created a solution that addressed their unique challenges head-on.
The result is a sophisticated web-based platform—a dynamic simulation twin of their entire manufacturing network. This unified system seamlessly integrates three powerful, interconnected simulation models, hosted on the AnyLogic Cloud model management platform for scalability and performance:
- The Portfolio Model: Looks at the current R&D pipeline and stochastically generates a range of plausible future asset lifecycles, accounting for the inherent uncertainty of clinical development.
- The Demand Model: Takes the outputs from the Portfolio model and translates them into a detailed, 10-year quarterly forecast of active ingredient requirements across the globe.
- The Capacity Model: This is the strategic core. It takes the demand forecast and evaluates a vast array of manufacturing options, investment plans, and supply chain configurations to determine the most efficient and robust way to meet that demand.
Our team engineered a custom data pipeline using web sockets and a modern ReactJS front-end. This automates the flow of data between the models, eliminating manual errors and creating a single, trusted source of truth. The platform allows AstraZeneca to simulate, stress-test, and optimise their strategy against countless future scenarios. This builds an inherently antifragile operational backbone that doesn’t just withstand volatility, but allows the organisation to learn and improve from it.
Business Outcomes & Impact: Confidence in the Face of Complexity
The impact of this transformation is profound, providing AstraZeneca with unprecedented strategic agility and confidence. The solution’s immediate value was confirmed by its end-users, achieving a System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 75.0. This rating is well above the industry average of 68, signifying high acceptance and usability across both technical and senior leadership teams, ensuring the tool is actively used to drive critical decisions.
By replacing a slow, manual process with an interactive simulation twin, AstraZeneca has drastically enhanced its workflow efficiency. They have minimised the risk of data errors and freed up their internal experts to shift their focus from laborious data wrangling to high-value strategic analysis and interpretation.
Most importantly, they can now proactively model the future, turning uncertainty into a competitive advantage. The leadership team can explore the long-term impact of M&A activity, pressure-test their network against potential supply disruptions, and confidently make multi-billion-pound capital investment decisions. This strategic capability ensures their production network is not just prepared for the future, but is actively shaped to thrive in it.