Since 1981, when CIBA Vision Canada Inc. was founded to serve the Canadian eye-care market, the company has grown to become a world leader, and Canada’s leading manufacturer of contact lenses and lens-care solutions. CIBA Vision Canada reached market leadership in its optics business in only seven years. Since 1991, the company has been making rapid progress toward leadership in eye medicines.

For CIBA Vision, market leadership has always been a key goal, but a goal to be attained through leadership in areas such as research and development, environmentally responsible manufacturing, advanced information systems and logistics, product support — the systematic pursuit of total quality through team building.
 

1. CIBA Vision leads the industry in customer satisfaction — staff are the key to this success 2. CIBA Vision staff work with state-of-the art “clean room” technology to ensure products remain pure throughout the manufacturing process.

CIBA Vision has always focused on providing real value and support to the eye-care professionals who are its clients. Advanced robotics and sophisticated telecommunications and computer systems have enabled CIBA Vision teams to provide just-in-time processing and 24-hour delivery of orders to major Canadian cities (same-day in the Toronto vicinity). CIBA Vision also supports the broadest range of contact lens products in the industry — over 250,000 different lens products and parameters — and the most common in stock, ready to be shipped. These are just some of the reasons why CIBA Vision continues to lead the eye care industry in customer satisfaction.

It was this pursuit of total quality which led CIBA Vision, in 1987, to purchase one of its prime suppliers, already a world leader in sterile manufacturing.

Sterile Pharmaceuticals Ltd. had built its own leadership in sterile manufacturing into an international success story. Founded in 1968 as a contract manufacturer of glass vials, ampoules, and injectables for the phar-maceuticals industry, the company pursued technical leadership from the outset.

Sterile manufacturing involves making and packaging products in an aseptic environment — the alliance of myriad technologies, immense training and human skill to pursue absolute purity in a manufacturing process. It is a high-risk, high-tech business in which microbiologists wage constant war against contamination of any kind, but no CIBA Vision product has ever been recalled. In 1993 CIBA Vision Sterile Manufacturing achieved registration to the ISO 9002 international quality standard.

Not content with leadership, CIBA Vision Sterile Manufacturing has always invested heavily in research and development to create ever more advanced pro-cesses. It has extended its leadership with unique achievements like aseptic blow-molding of plastic bottles and ampoules.

Such innovation depends on the teamwork of skilled people working within the stringent constraints of the pharmaceuticals industry.

CIBA Vision Sterile Manufacturing occupies a 140,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Streetsville, and has grown from a staff of only seven, in 1975, to a still-lean 210 at present. As CIBA Vision sets new goals for continued leadership in the Canadian marketplace, the company keeps moving toward leadership in international markets, also. Already 90 percent of CIBA Vision’s products are manufactured for markets around the world. With both capacity and skills to spare, CIBA Vision is looking out from Canada to the world, a Canadian success story.