How Grifols reclaimed 93 workdays of quality team time

About Grifols

Grifols is a global healthcare company headquartered in Barcelona, Spain. Founded in 1909, the company is a leader in plasma-derived medicines and transfusion medicine, providing innovative healthcare services and solutions in more than 110 countries. 

The Challenge

Grifols’ quality team needed to continue conducting Vendor qualification audits but lacked the internal resources to keep pace with demand. With a small team responsible for a growing Vendor qualification workload, the audit burden had become a bottleneck, slowing down qualification timelines and pulling quality personnel away from higher-priority activities. 

Conducting each audit internally required significant coordination, time, and budget. The team needed a way to offload audit execution without compromising quality and sought a faster and more efficient approach. 

The Solution

Grifols partnered with Diligent Pharma to expand their Vendor qualification capacity through a combination of new audits and existing library reports. 

• Library Report Access: Grifols accessed 10 pre-existing audit reports from Diligent’s library, qualifying their Vendors in days rather than months. 

• New Vendor Qualification Audits: For Vendors not already in the platform, Diligent conducted new Vendor qualification audits on Grifols’ behalf, handling scoping, scheduling, and audit execution, freeing internal quality resources from months of logistical work. 

The Results

In the first year of their partnership with Diligent, Grifols achieved: 

• $150,000 in direct cost avoidance by accessing library reports instead of conducting 10 individual qualification audits. 

• Qualification timelines reduced from months to less than 1 week when leveraging existing reports 

• ~750 hours (93 workdays) of internal audit work offloaded across 15 Vendor qualifications, freeing the quality team for strategic work.