Venair is an emerging company in the biopharmaceutical industry, engineering and manufacturing silicone hoses. It identified BioPhorum’s Single-Use User Requirement Toolkit as an essential aid to support its work with customers, adapting and implementing it across its company. Ultimately this created so much value for the business that Venair sought BioPhorum membership.
We spoke with Nasim Adnan Moucharrafie, Director of the Biotech Division at Venair Group, about its BioPhorum membership and the benefits of being part of the Supply Partner Phorum.
What led you to join BioPhorum?
We knew about the various BioPhorum activities, such as the industry-wide best practice setting work in the extractables area. But our size and level of activity in the industry meant that it never seemed a good time for us to join.
As the covid pandemic struck, there was a need to support the additional demand volume created by vaccine production. This provided growth opportunities for Venair and, with our increasing traction in the industry, it made perfect sense for us to join BioPhorum.
This was all a milestone for us and opened a new chapter for our company. Our membership is part of a wider campaign that includes a new corporate branding with increased digital presence, new production facilities in Spain and the US, better-organized product development and a more technical sales force. We’re now in our second year as BioPhorum members.
How have you benefited from BioPhorum Supply Partner?
We’ve incorporated many BioPhorum tools into our products, such as the Extractables Protocol. We adapted the Single-Use User Requirement Template to our needs and have used the Supply Change Notification Protocol.
We’re a small company, so successfully investing in new facilities, offices, locations, or product lines (with the regulatory load and expense these involve) is not something that can be easily forecast. However, being in the Phorum shows that everyone has the same issues, and we gain valuable insights into market-wide conditions.
And while nobody shares their strategy, we can see patterns and identify actions to take to be much more effective and achieve our goals. Knowing the industry consensus on an issue is really helpful and can be the simplest thing or the most complicated. For example, I remember the Phorum’s Baltimore meeting where we talked about having an understanding between suppliers and users about the minimum time between a purchase order and delivery. Such knowledge is invaluable to us.
How would you define your involvement and expectations in the future?
We are new to being a biopharmaceutical supplier, which means that we are learning about the type of conversations involved, the length of the projects, the complexity we can expect from them, how demanding quality departments are, etc. We don’t see these things in our industrial or even in our food-pharma clients, where the items we supply are considered non-critical components. So, the unique insight that being a member of BioPhorum gives us is a perspective that helps us to be better prepared for our customers.
This sector is highly regulated, and things need to be done in a very specific way. We need to be like other biopharmaceutical suppliers. To do that, there is nothing better than asking biopharmaceutical end-users directly
BioPhorum is the perfect platform for that.Nasim Adnan Moucharrafie, Director of the Biotech Division at Venair Group
What’s the main benefit of your experience with BioPhorum?
A lot of business happens when you have trust in people, and they trust you. Earning this requires more than, for example, discussing a presentation. You need to spend hours with your peers and customers, work with them, see how they are when they are happy and when they socialize. Only then will you start to grasp whether someone is the type of person you want to do business with and vice versa. Yes, companies work together, but it’s the people and their relationships at a personal level that makes a business a success or not. BioPhorum and its face-to-face meetings are where you get to know people and build that trust and those relationships. It’s where you learn how to operate at your best.
