Pharmaceutical Transport Carts

Boehringer Ingelheim facility outside of Cleveland, OH, Ben Venue Laboratories, needed aseptic carts to move pharmaceutical products around their facility. These carts had racks for product and HEPA filters as well as fans and lights so there was a small control and battery stored on the cart as well as a way to operate and charge the battery. IP Systems could only win the project if we could design, fabricate, and ship by December 31 and it was October when we received the order. We were contracted to deliver 10 carts.


An extremely aggressive schedule, compressed from what should have been 6-9 months for design & build to 3 months with liquidated damages of 1% of the project per day it was late. We delivered before the deadline, on December 30.
I worked with the suppliers on this project to expedite our orders with minimal or no expediting charges which allowed us to maintain our gross margin.

At one point, the manufacturing group had all carts as a Work-In-Progress, significant advancement had slowed and we were only a week or so from delivery. I did not want to interfere with the tight schedule and have the assemblers stop working but it was clear they had been crippled with the overwhelming work in front of them. We stopped all work, I pulled the team together and we walked through each cart to figure out what needed to be done and posted a written list on the side of the cart that they could cross off.