Swindon specialists lead training for new Irish pharmaceutical facility

A specialist team from the Wasdell Group, in Swindon, has been training new staff in Ireland this week, as the company’s new €36m facility in Dundalk gets ready to start production.

Wasdell has built the new pharmaceutical packaging, testing and distribution facility to support further expansion throughout Ireland and Europe, and to maintain a foothold in Europe for their international clients who need certainty of access to the EU market.

The team of trainers, led by operations manager Tony Smith and technical manager Tim Wakely, includes skilled engineers and production and quality control specialists.  Some were hand-selected from their new Ireland recruits, but most were drawn from the group’s Swindon-based talent.  Many of the Swindon staff developed their specialist skills through their own professional development at the Wasdell Group facility in Blagrove, and are now able to perform key training roles to support the growing firm’s expansion.

“This has been a massive undertaking, but for every area of the business, we have created Standard Operating Procedures, and set up Matrix systems to enable us to deliver training needs across the whole of the new operation in Ireland,” Tony Smith explained. 

“We’ve used key staff from Swindon to send across to Ireland, to run much of the training in situ. We have seven trainers out there now, working across two shifts.”

As a result of the training, the facility is able to start operation this month, with a number of Wasdell’s clients now in Ireland to witness the validation of the new production lines. 

Whilst much of the work for pharmaceuticals bound for the EU will now be moving to Ireland, in preparation for Brexit, the Swindon plant remains as busy as ever.

“We’re recognised as one of the fastest growing companies in the UK, and we’re always taking on new clients as a result of continual innovation in our technology and processes,” said Tim Wakely.

“In Swindon, for example, our specialist team who deal with medicines for clinical trials in patients has grown rapidly.”

Another round of training will take place over the summer to enable the plant to deliver the latest serialisation technology designed to tackle counterfeit medicines, an area in which the Wasdell Group has already taken a lead in the pharmaceutical sector. 

Further training will continue to be led by the highly skilled Swindon teams, as the new facility in Ireland ramps up to full operation.