INCOG BioPharma Services Reviews

It took me a while to figure out what was wrong with the organization, and why their batch release times are abysmal. As I began my work as an end user of INCOGs quality systems I discovered a hair raising amount of human error and blame shifting throughout INCOGs problem solving. Most of its leaders come from a recently acquired site in Bloomington with a very bad quality record, and whose most recent 483s made headlines. Not just for the deviations themselves but the lack of root cause analyses and under triaged investigations. After learning this, INCOGs quality made a lot more sense. The quality department is run by manufacturing. That’s why most of their quality events have outrageous closure times. INCOGs QA Operations are largely a cosmetic presence as many of the personnel are severely under qualified. Most of the managers have no science background and/or expertise making medicines. On top of that, they are surprisingly resistant to change despite claiming to champion “innovation.” I figured out this stems from the top. The CEO has no science education, and is mimicking other business magnates using aseptic manufacturing as fodder for business arbitrage with little concern for the patients that need these medicines. As a result they allow human error based thinking to be an anathema to Kaizen. ALCOA++ is not a thing there and metadata is often not representative of the underlying data used to create it. The manufacturing managers lean on quality event authors to soften language, to sanitize reports leaving them bereft of the technical muster they require to prevent recurrence. The goal of INCOG is short to medium term expansion of the business ecosystem so that it’s ripe for a sale. That’s why there is no true QA Incoming or QA Batch Release, and most of the people approving investigations have little to no science education or training. Manufacturing leaders don’t allow the quality unit to adequately accept or reject process decisions. Moreover, the engineers are decoupled from validation and there is no quality voice questioning the validity or justification for manufacturing decisions. In terms of quality, it will push your melon back. Everyone is too afraid of getting let go to stand up for the patient. My final assessment is those aren’t business priorities because the goal is a sale and not longevity. Friends of the CEO build pharma companies up and sell them all the time. The perversion of the business debts is his business, pharma is just the modicum which is interchangeable. He will tell you himself he was going to start a chain of Taco Bell’s before finding private funds for INCOG and he runs it as such. As soon as the company went black he went and asked more private equity for another 9 figure sum (public info see the press release); the business is run on debt. That means less capital expenditure on quality infrastructure because the goal is physical infrastructure. That means you can expect him to ride away on his golden bicycle when regulatory pressure to ameliorate deep seated quality issues mount beyond what he’s willing to spend to fix them.

What do you think should get people in the workplace promoted? People here get promoted based on the buddy system rather than performance, skills, knowledge, experience or years of service. People they hire and promote are not expirenced and won't ever get good experience here. Working here is poor experience for the employees due to the poor way things are done here. Good luck going from working here to working at a legitimate pharmaceutical manufacturing company. People that get promoted are the worst employees due to lack of attention by "leadership" and the poor culture. This company has poor leadership that doesn't actually pay any attention and just makes decisions based on ignorance. Most of these "leaders" clearly have never worked a real job a day of their lives, which is probably why they are such poor leaders and have no character or integrity. There are great workers with twenty years of great pharmaceutical manufacturing experience mopping floors in the warehouse here. I see production workers come here with a degree and 20 years of hands on experience from Eli Lilly thinking they are going to help their careers and move up here and they soon realize they made a mistake. You are not the kind of person they promote here. Those people have tons of experience and great resumes. They are stuck at the bottom here. There is a underlying bad culture especially with office workers and HR. Good employees are ignored and made to do all the work that bad employees are allowed to choose not to do. People in leadership roles here have zero integrity and they will expect you to have zero integrity as well or else you will be retaliated against. This company lies to their employees every step of the way including to get you into the door. They offer very little PTO and zero sick days. They have poor heath insurance. They have a terrible 401K match. There is zero employee performance data, just made up nonsense because actually paying attention is too hard and looking up who has done the most of everything is too much work and these "leaders" don't have the skills to see that information anyway because they never learned it. Co-Workers are lazy, slow and unwilling to learn or perform their entire role. After having been performing the tasks now associated with a newly created role, more than anyone in the history of the company, you still won't be "qualified" for that newly created role but anyone with any bachelor's degree with zero experience and from outside of the company will be qualified and will get the role over you. Amazing leadership decision there. They intentionally hire and promote inexperienced and spineless people for critical roles to be able to get away with doing things they shouldn't be doing. Some people can justify anything they do in their own minds but those are excuses for bad leadership. Everything you've seen and hated at the other pharmacutical companies is alive a well here too, thanks to the poor "leadership". The CEO tells everyone he was originally going to go into landscaping but decided to go into sterile injectable pharmaceutical manufacturing. Go look at the landscaping at this place. Skip this place and go straight to Eli Lilly or Novartis.