In Conversation with Angela Strzelecki of Dupont at CPhI 2018

Angela Strzelecki: I'm with the Japan DuPont Nutrition & Health. I've been with DuPont for 26 years. I'm a chemist by training. I've had a number of roles in technology and operations and customer-facing roles, and now I currently lead the pharma excipients business for DuPont. The recent merger of DowDuPont has really brought together two very diverse portfolios. As we've brought them together with the intent to separate into three separate companies next year, it creates a lot of opportunities to really combine together businesses that have a common goal with respect to the markets they serve, how they want to serve those markets, the value they bring to their customers, and a very complementary portfolio of products. So that has been one area that we've seen specifically in our pharm excipients businesses. We've brought these two entities together — it's been phenomenal. So really bringing together the heritage Health & Nutrition business acquired from FMC and then the DuPont food and pharm business has really, as I mentioned, brought together a really good example of that complementarity of products, very strong capabilities coming from both organizations. And as the teams have gotten together and learned about each other, you know, just ideas come out of that to really drive the innovation engine and really drive solutions we're looking to bring to the emerging needs of our customers. The benefits of having a broad portfolio we are finding every day. I'm very excited as we've brought the teams together and looking at the capabilities from both sides coming in to form this pharma excipients business: strong capabilities in immediate release and controlled release technologies, strong capabilities in co-processing of ingredients, strong capabilities in polymer architecture. All of these are important building blocks to continue to refine the toolbox of products we have to solve problems for our customers.

Well, if you look at the application we go into, the pharmaceutical industry, there's an aging population and increasing demand for our materials and materials that our customers make. Also, you think about it, what company is not really trying to get the products out the door faster, not trying to drive efficiency in their operations or improve their cost position? So what we have to offer with this combined portfolio is really working very hard partnering with our customers to develop offerings that will drive greater efficiency in their operations to produce the products faster. Some of those offerings include our Methocel DC2 offering, which allows our customers to decrease cycle times in their processes by up to 60%. We've also been introducing some new co-processed materials as well that will give greater efficiency to our customers who are tableting and making materials that they're trying to get out quickly to the customer. So we think it's a great opportunity to partner with them, understand their issues, understand their needs, understand their issues for the future with respect to efficiency, and be able to deliver continued solutions in that area.

Quality is key. I mean quality is so important to our customers, it's so important to us. It's interesting, as I'm coming to this business relatively new, DuPont has always had a history of safety, and safety the goal being zero. We have that same philosophy when it comes to quality: zero tolerance for quality defects. So we need to look at that, and we do look at that across our processes, from when we're manufacturing materials from our raw materials coming in, our manufacturing processes, but also as we release those products and ship those parts to our customers. It has to be there because our customers rely on this work.

Continuity of supply is incredibly important to our customers. Customers, if you look at the products that our products go into, so this is really key. And our customers depend on us to be a reliable supplier. As such, we have spent a lot of time with our assets making sure we have strong business continuity plans, making sure we have capability across assets and across countries to produce products so that we can supply reliability to our customers.

Regulatory is such a key part of our industry, and as we realize, it's such a partnership between us and our customers. Our customers have strong needs in a regulatory area, and we as excipient providers do as well. So we've continued to be very active in IPEC with respect to regulatory issues affecting excipients, to make sure we are advocating on behalf of excipients in this area. We have actually in the Americas the president of IPEC comes from our business, and we've also been very strong and founding members of the same organization throughout the world. So again, we're committed to that from an industry perspective. The other area we're committed to, and what we find is vitally important, is to be able to have those close collaborations when it comes to regulatory with our customers. So again, our ability to help them and to work together to work through the regulatory requirements of this industry are pretty critical.