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Apotex Inc. – Expansion of the Etobicoke, Ontario Facility
Facility Considerations
 In 2001, Apotex Inc. realized that to meet rising demand for its products, it would need to expand the production capacity of its Etobicoke, Ontario facility from 1 billion doses per year to 5 billion doses per year. Less than three years later, in 2004, the expanded facility went into operation.
The facility incorporates numerous innovative applications of technology - from the pharmaceutical industry and others - that automate and simplify the handling of materials. In addition, the facility employs "N+1" redundancy for all the plant's mechanical operations, ensuring the facility can operate 24 hours a day - eliminating shutdowns.
Other notable facility features include a "repeatable" design that will allow, if needed, facility expansion in two years or less by simply building a mirror image of the current facility.
Construction, from ground-breaking to completion, took 24 months, during that time 300 contractors employing almost 4,00 workers were on site.
Processes/Manufacturing Equipment Employed
 The expansion of Apotex's Etobicoke facility was not simply an exercise in enlarging the production capacity of the existing facility. Instead, says Larry Rock, Vice-President of Engineering Services "We used the start-up of the new facility as giving us a new way of running the business. We took the opportunity to start a zero-based approach in all areas - GMP, product integrity, all the aspects."
This zero-based approach to the design of the expanded facility resulted in applications of new technology and new applications of existing technology to create a workflow that ensures high product quality, high levels of worker safety, and drastically improved productivity. The combined power of the intensive design workshops facilitated by the Project Team to optimize room and equipment configuration, and the search for applicable technologies from outside the pharmaceutical industry, such as the automotive, catalogue and internet merchants, helped Apotex turn this zero-based approach to facility design into a "step change" in the way the facility worked.
Here are a few highlights of the technologies employed in the expanded facility:
• Virtually all material handling inside the Etobicoke facility is automated, through the use of Self-Guided Vehicles, a physical-space design that utilizes gravity to move materials from one process to another, the adaptation of state-of-the-art warehousing and distribution technologies from other industries (RFID), and Apotex innovative design of transfer chambers for WIP.
• Apotex created a unique, custom-designed user interface to its SAP system for all the computers used by manufacturing operators that integrates all these automated activities seamlessly.
• The expanded facility has 15,000 square feet of laboratory space dedicated to quality assurance. All these laboratories run entirely on uninterrupted power supplies, and employ innovative systems that centralize the distribution of gases directly to laboratory workstations and amalgamate the disposal of hazardous solvents used in the labs.
• The Project Team examined in detail how people, vehicles and materials interact inside the facility. All tableting/encapsulation suites and their accompanying cleaning facilities are arranged on either side of a central corridor, where people travel on foot. Surrounding this "pod" arrangement are separate automated material handling corridors.
• Every process room is positioned adjacent to a separate small service room, through which all utilities and other mechanical services enter the process room. This minimizes the need for mechanics to enter the process rooms.
Apotex Inc
150 Signet Dr
Weston, ON, M9L 1T9
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