Eli Lilly and Company Limited, Speke Operations, UK
11,000 calibrations a year, made mostly with Beamex calibration equipment.

Eli Lilly and Company is one of the world’s largest research-based pharmaceutical companies dedicated to creating and delivering innovative pharmaceutical health care solutions that enable people to live longer, healthier and more active lives. Lilly employs more than 44,000 people worldwide and markets its products in 143 countries. The Lilly plant in Speke, Liverpool is a bulk manufacturer of animal health, veterinary, and pharmaceutical products. Each area of manufacture has a control group, which is responsible for calibrating the instrumentation that controls manufacturing processes. The Speke plant is Lilly’s largest European manufacturing plant.

The purpose of calibrations is to ensure that the plant is in control of their manufacturing processes, and that the calibrations performed there are documented and traceable to meet internationally recognised standards.

The situation

“We perform in excess of eleven thousand calibrations per annum across a wide range of instrumentation and control equipment”, Derek Cross begins. Derek is Site Reliability Engineer at Lilly’s Speke plant.

Calibrating process instruments is considered essential at the Speke plant. “Quality calibration is crucial in demonstrating that we are in control of our processes; it is a key requirement in ensuring the safety, identity, strength, purity and quality of all our products”.

“Calibration is absolutely vital. Apart from being a heavily regulated industry, manufacturing medicines is a serious business that affects everyone’s lives directly or indirectly, including our own employees and their families who are also customers. The importance of quality calibration of instrumentation, and how it relates to the manufacture of our products, cannot be overstated, it is well understood and acknowledged at all levels within our company. We invest heavily in the finest instrumentation, control systems, and secondary standard test equipment available to ensure we achieve the high standards of compliance we demand”.

The solution and main benefits

“We perform calibrations across a wide range of instrumentation, controlling numerous process parameters, temperature, pressure, flow, weight, pH, conductivity, dissolved oxygen and speed, among other things”.

The entire process of planning and managing calibrations is well organized. “Our maintenance program is controlled via a (CMMS) computerized maintenance management system. Each department has an Engineering Planner and Engineering Co-ordinator, whose role is to plan and schedule maintenance work for our engineering people”, Derek clarifies. The requirements for calibration equipment are high. “Accuracy, reliability, traceability, robustness, electronic documentation storage and interface capabilities”.

“At Speke we have invested in the Beamex MC5 Multifunction Calibrator based on its accuracy specification, multifunction capabilities and robustness. Additionally, we knew the MC5 had the capabilities to interface with existing systems on site, which gave us the potential to leverage calibration documentation capabilities. The MC5 is our primary calibration standard on site and it is used extensively with the majority of calibrations”.

Using Beamex’s calibration equipment has provided many benefits. “The MC5 is a relatively new addition to our secondary measurement standards, and the initial feedback has been excellent. The main benefits have yet to be realized, and we are currently working through the requirements of interfacing the Beamex MC5 to existing systems so we can download calibration schemes to the MC5, perform calibrations, then upload results, creating the possibility of a paperless calibration system”, Derek states. “The capability of the MC5 provides us with opportunities which we did not previously have, and we will be seeking to leverage these capabilities in our never-ending journey to improve the way we do things”, Derek concludes.