Catalent boosts speed and quality in drug development and manufacturing

Lindsay Fernandez, VP of Enterprise Applications at Catalent, reveals how the company transformed its approach to document management to help global teams work faster, ensuring high quality production.

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Lindsay Fernandez

August 07, 20253 min read

Two scientists in a lab looking at a laptop screen

Catalent is one of the world’s largest Contract Development and Manufacturing Organizations (CDMO). We help pharma and biotech companies to develop and produce vital medical treatments. At any given time, we have over 1,000 products in development.  

We’re constantly trying to strike a balance between getting products to market quickly and maintaining strict quality and compliance standards. However, our old approach of multiple document management solutions and piles of paper was making this increasingly difficult.  

Our people were literally weighed down by paper. For instance, when manufacturing a new batch of drugs, our operators had to print out a 150-page batch record document and haul it from workstation to workstation to capture the information they needed. We knew this approach wasn’t sustainable, so we started looking for a better way.  

Creating a single source of truth

After considering many options, we found what we were looking for in OpenText™ Documentum™ Content Management (CM) for Life Sciences. What caught our attention was how well it aligned with our industry’s needs. The Documentum Quality and Manufacturing solution is pre-validated to meet pharmaceutical standards and offered robust controls for auditing. 

We also decided that a privately hosted cloud-based platform worked best for our business. We needed to onboard 16,000 users across seven countries. Opting for OpenText™ Private Cloud didn’t just simplify the initial migration, it will make it much easier to keep everyone on the same page and scale services up as we continue to grow. Best of all, OpenText handles the technical side of things, so we can focus on our core mission.  

OpenText™ Professional Services mapped our business specific processes and requirements to the solution and configured the environment in a private cloud. Our experience with them has been top notch. They’ve helped us through the journey of going from multiple legacy systems to one of the best Life Sciences industry solutions on the market proven to meet large enterprise needs.  

We’ve come such a long way already with OpenText. With OpenText Documentum CM for Life Sciences, we finally have a single source of truth for everything from batch records to standard operating procedures (SOPs).  

Finding a better balance

The results speak for themselves. We’ve slashed paper usage by up to 30% across 15 manufacturing sites—that’s a win for both efficiency and the environment.  

Most importantly, we’re closer to perfecting the tightrope walk between speed and quality. Our people have access to the most current and approved content at their fingertips. Likewise, standardized workflows mean processes run the same way, every time. It gives us the consistency and confidence to move faster while maintaining impeccable quality standards, so we are ready for Health Authority audits.  

At the end of the day, that helps us get life-saving treatments off the production line as quickly and safely as possible—allowing us to make good on our mission to help people live better and healthier lives. 

To learn more about our approach to content management, read our case study. 

Read the case study

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Lindsay Fernandez

Lindsay Fernandez, VP, Enterprise Services at Catalent Pharma Solutions, is an experienced pharma leader with deep expertise in IT, operations, development, and the delivery of cost-effective, value-added solutions. Bringing over two decades of experience across IT, supply chain, and manufacturing operations, he is passionate for enabling people, processes, and innovative thinking to drive results.

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