Cosmos Pharmaceuticals Improves Productivity by 50%

Cosmos Limited is one of the leading manufacturers of pharmaceutical products in Kenya and the first local manufacturer of antiretroviral medication in East Africa. Their goal is to make the region self-sufficient in essential medicines. Cosmos started in 1978 as the brain child of Prakash Patel, a talented pharmacist who realized that almost all medicine in East Africa was being imported from abroad. Good medicine was expensive and out of the reach of the majority of the population earning low or middle income. This led him to start Cosmos to manufacture quality and affordable medicines locally. Cosmos is now one of the most reputable pharmaceutical manufacturers in East and Central Africa, serving 10 countries in the region.

Most factories still run on paper and memory. That was true at Cosmos, where the team worked from printed spreadsheets, white boards, and handwritten shift reports. The team gave the best numbers they had. The gap was seeing what happened on the floor in time to act.

Jacob Malowa, Engineering and Project Manager at Cosmos, knows the power of digitization and harnessed it by implementing Guidewheel at his pharmaceutical manufacturing facility. He and Cosmos have been working with Guidewheel for the last several years. Malowa originally brought Guidewheel on to save energy, improve production throughput, and give his team real-time information they can act on at the machine. Through continuous monitoring and improvement, Malowa and team have achieved 50% productivity improvement and 45% reduction in Energy Intensity.

In addition to that, Cosmos quickly realized that they could use Guidewheel to streamline maintenance operations. Cosmos also used Guidewheel alerts and issues to point the maintenance team at downtime that needed attention, so they could keep improving machine health and production efficiency. Before Guidewheel, this was tracked manually in spreadsheets and a Building Management System (BMS).

Lauren Dunford, CEO of Guidewheel, praised the team at Cosmos:

“I am thrilled with how Malowa and the Cosmos team have used Guidewheel not only for all of the expected use cases, but also used the alerts and issues functionality to digitize tracking for their maintenance team.”

Malowa and his team specifically appreciate that they can tag issues with a work order number and tie each one to a specific downtime event. Their team uses Guidewheel to automatically send alerts via text and for the team to acknowledge and close issues when complete. For example, the screenshot shows an example of issues that have been tagged as “Electrical” or “Repair” in Guidewheel with a Work Order number and a short description of the request.

View fullsize Work Order Issues in Guidewheel

By clicking into any of the issues, anyone can see more detail about who was assigned this alert as well as the activity stream as to when alerts were sent, received, acknowledged, and statuses updated. All of this information is paired with the real-time “heartbeat” of what the machine was doing at that time.

Details of machine performance in Guidewheel

In the last year, 578 maintenance work orders have been created at Cosmos from alerts originating from downtime incidents captured by the Guidewheel system. Guidewheel’s alerting, tagging, and easy reporting capabilities have been a significant improvement for Cosmos, increasing their ability to manage and address these issues, as well as making them significantly more proactive as a team. 99% of all the work orders raised in 2023 have been acknowledged by assignees via SMS. This means that issues get attended to on time, saving valuable production time and giving teams more visibility.

Cosmos tied their maintenance requests to downtime events in Guidewheel, so the team could see what each machine was doing when an issue came in. If you already run a CMMS or another maintenance system, Guidewheel works alongside it through an open API and integrations. You keep the systems you have. Our Customer Experience team is always happy to support you in thinking through the best option for your setup.

Our thanks to Jacob Malowa, Engineering Project Manager, from Cosmos for sharing his experience highlighted here. If you and your team would like to showcase how you are using Guidewheel to drive business results, or don’t yet use Guidewheel, but would like to!, send us a note at info@guidewheel.com .