ENTERPRISE SPONSOR: Equipment
Federal Equipment, one of That's Nice's Road to 2021 sponsors, discusses how the company is envisioning the future of the pharma/biopharma industry.
Over the next decade, we anticipate a great deal of innovation and development in pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturing. Major pharmaceutical companies will want stronger control of their supply chains and the ability to respond to emergencies like COVID-19 with quicker speeds with both new and existing manufacturing processes. Federal Equipment Company offers those companies the ability to source equipment for their development or existing manufacturing projects at greatly reduced purchase prices and with immediate access.
Due to the pandemic, the used process and packaging equipment industry, and many others, accelerated plans and actions to facilitate doing business in certain ways more virtually. We have come a long way from taking instant Polaroid photos of equipment and sending them to customers in a courier’s envelope. We are now doing many equipment inspections with FaceTime and discussing deals through Zoom meetings. While some things may return to normal in 2021, we could very well see some of these changes remain going forward.
We plan to increasingly use technology to improve communication and receive rapid feedback, both internally and externally with our customers and clients. This will allow us to iterate our digital platforms and presences and tailor our investment recovery programs, service offerings, and how we present equipment for sale to meet the needs of our customers.
For the last 20 years, we’ve grown our pharmaceutical business into the leader in the used pharmaceutical equipment industry.
Disruptive Innovations
Federal Equipment Company sponsored and actively developed the hugely popular Virtual Expo Series. With two online Virtual Pharma Expo events in 2020, we reached thousands of people in the industry with live discussions about equipment and process technology development. Our format allowed users to hear from a wide range of experts from equipment suppliers and service providers in a short period of time. We feel that this virtual trade concept will continue into the future as people are able to learn about new innovations remotely, and the suppliers were able to reach a large number of people with relatively low production costs. We certainly miss seeing our customers in person, but we see value in continuing to offer remote and mobile device–friendly events that allow us to show up where our customers can meet us.
People are using mobile devices more than ever, and there is no doubt that usage will continue to rise. Our challenge is to continue to include engaging and informative content that helps our customers improve their decision-making on a mobile-ready platform. Imagine, from an equipment purchasing perspective, being able to see the equipment you’re considering purchasing placed virtually on your production floor and being able to view equipment in 360 degrees. Another area is parts.
We have acquired many parts from liquidations over the years, including machines that are probably more valuable as a source of spare parts than they are as a complete machine. Inventorying and marketing these lower-value units of inventory was cost-prohibitive until recently. Look for a launch of PharmParts in Q4 of 2020, and you can achieve significant cost savings by purchasing original equipment parts at a huge discount. We plan to offer parts for a wide variety of equipment, primarily focused on solid-dose manufacturing to start. The parts will range from brand new to parts that have some wear but may be enough to get your machine running until a new part arrives.
For the last 20 years, we’ve grown our pharmaceutical business into the leader in the used pharmaceutical equipment industry. We’ve added complementary services, like manufacturing process training, decontamination, and now parts and virtual shows. We will continue to be aggressive in providing equipment solutions within the entire pharmaceutical industry.
