ISPE’s 2019 Facility of the Year Award for Operational Excellence won by partners Exyte and Kantonsapotheke Zurich

The award was announced on 2 April 2019 at the ISPE Europe Annual Conference in Dublin, Ireland. Exyte sincerely congratulates its client on this success. The facility Kantonsapotheke Zurich (KAZ) is a true shift forward, as a confluence of ideas, leadership, technology, finance and marketplace. It leads the very concept of hospital pharmacies into the future and establishes benchmarks of operational excellence never seen before in patient focused facilities.

ISPE’s annual FOYA Awards identify the best projects around the world in Life Science, recognizing  innovation and creativity in technology, regulatory compliance, operations and business practices. Exyte is pleased to have been the design-build partner bringing this project from concept to startup.

“Working in concert with the leadership team of Kantonapotheke Zurich, Exyte provided engineering, procurement, construction management and validation that led to the development of this technologically-advanced facility”, outlines François Abiven, President Life Sciences & Chemicals at Exyte.

Life Sciences & Chemicals is the second largest strategic business segment of Exyte measured by sales revenue. Exyte is a provider and integrator of technology advanced solutions, including design, construction and commissioning to deliver complex processing plants. For this segment Exyte provides a full range of services: consulting & planning, engineering, project management, construction, commissioning and qualification for customers in the pharmaceuticals & biotechnology, food & nutrition, consumer care and specialty chemicals industries.

Operational excellence benchmark sets a new standard

The KAZ has replaced and integrated two outdated hospital pharmacies that had been unable to continue serving the progressive needs of the community. Today, the facility provides the Canton of Zurich hospital system a range of oral, dermal and parenteral formulations, often with patient-specific recipes. It is highly flexible, adaptable and expandable to easily and quickly accommodate new functions, such as the rapidly emerging field of personalized medicine. All products are manufactured under industrial cGMP conditions, a major step change that is new to hospital pharmacies and their workers.

According to Armin Uwira, Head of Engineering at Exyte in Switzerland: “KAZ is the first of a kind, a technically, financially and operationally superior facility serving hospital patients. It has achieved an astonishing performance record of 60 to 90 minutes turnaround from diagnostic test and prescription to patient injection for cytotoxic compounds used oncology. The facility raises the bar of quality and drives the use of cGMP protocols and behavior into hospital pharmacies.”

About the ISPE Facility of the Year Awards Program

Established in 2004, The Facility of the Year Awards (FOYA) recognize state-of-the-art projects utilizing new, innovative technologies to improve the quality of products, reduce the cost of producing high-quality medicines, and demonstrate advances in project delivery. The FOYA program provides a platform for the pharmaceutical science and manufacturing industry to showcase its accomplishments in facility design, construction, and operation, while sharing the development of new applications of technology and cutting-edge approaches.