Development of a performance measurement system for the delivery of pharmaceutical capital facility projects

This research documents the development of a performance measurement system for the delivery of pharmaceutical capital facility projects. The purpose of this research is to develop a system for evaluating pharmaceutical projects with metrics specific to the characteristics of these unique projects. The pharmaceutical industry is unique in its procedures and methods of manufacture and thus requires a distinct project management approach. The hypothesis for this research is that project performance tailored to the process of pharmaceutical projects can be measured, and that the industry norms may be established. There are six specific objectives that support main goal of this study: (1) Develop metrics tailored to pharmaceutical capital facility projects; (2) Develop a data collection system for validation and use of these metrics; (3) Collect data and develop a methodology for analysis; (4) Develop a reporting system that meets the needs of the industry for use of the metrics; (5) Validate and refine the performance measurement system based upon the collected data and industry experts’ opinions; and, finally (6) Provide lessons learned and recommend a direction for future studies. The primary contribution of this research is to provide the pharmaceutical industry a standard system for quantifying performance of their capital facility projects, ultimately establishing a methodology of developing the system for other industries. To do so, this research will provide a hierarchical structure of pharmaceutical project types as a framework enabling pharmaceutical projects to be properly grouped and benchmarked. Moreover, this research will produce industry-specific metrics tuned to the processes of pharmaceutical projects. Effective utilization of the metrics produced through this research requires their adjustment for location and time to ensure meaningful comparisons. Thus, procedures will be developed to produce a project database maintained in current dollars at a common location. In addition, this research will provide project performance norms for the principal pharmaceutical project types and will produce a customized report effectively showing and comparing project performance with the existing CII BM&M database as well as the pharmaceutical project database developed by this research.