ABSTRACT
I. INTRODUCTION Pharmaceutical R&D spending has been doubling every five years, which is equivalent to a 15 percent yearly increase. This trend can not sustain itself indefinitely. R&D will have to become more efficient, just as manufacturing has. This will mean that management will expect more productivity with equal or less spending. R&D is still vital for innovative pharmaceutical companies in that future competitiveness and profits depend on a continuous pipeline of new products. Pharmaceutical firms have large investments in their internal R&D facilities and personnel. In order to get more value of each R&D dollar spent, management will institute a number of cost savings policies and implement concurrent R&D. Concurrent R&D will incur more risk but shorten the time to· market for new products by paralleling as many activities as possible. This change in the way R&D is done will necessitate implementing new ideas. These will essentially be ways of empowering the researchers already employed so that they can become more productive. The automation professional is well versed in these methods due to the fact that they have been implementing them in the manufacturing environment since the 1980s. The techniques have been refined based on actual experience. Automating the R&D environment will be an integral piece in making research more competitive. In fact, competitiveness in R&D will determine which technology companies will survive, just as manufacturing competitiveness determined the survivors of the 1970s and 1980s.
