Laura Ambler

Meet Laura

At SPI Pharma, quality isn't just a department, it's the thread that connects customer trust to everything happening behind the scenes. In this installment of our Meet the Experts series, we sat down with Laura Ambler, Quality Systems Specialist at the Grand Haven site, to talk about her path into quality, the work that keeps customers informed and confident, and what she's most proud of after over a decade with the team.

A Move That Led to a Career

Laura's path to SPI started with a relocation, not a job search. Her husband moved to the Grand Haven area for his job in 2012, so the two packed up together. She came from Emergent Bio Solutions, where she'd spent about four years as a senior manufacturing technician working on the anthrax vaccine, her first real introduction to the pharma industry. With no job lined up yet, she came across a temp posting at SPI, backfilling for someone implementing Master Control at the site. Eight months later, she was hired on full time.

Finding Her Way Into Quality

That original temp role turned out to be the start of Laura's quality career. The person she was backfilling handled supplier quality management, capital management, change controls, customer audit support, and the internal audit program, and mentored Laura through all of it while she implemented Master Control. That mentorship became Laura's entry point into quality, and the role has only grown since. Today she wears several hats at the Grand Haven site: customer complaint coordinator, document control coordinator, and change control coordinator, and she's been closely involved in building out Master Control's action items, change controls, events, and OLS functionality alongside colleagues across SPI's global sites.

Turning Complaints Into Continuous Improvement

Laura's biggest area of focus is customer complaints. She's written over 600 letters to customers based on complaint investigations, and her role is to make sure every complaint is properly evaluated, investigated, and answered, ideally within the company's 30-day target. Her reasoning is simple: when a customer has an issue, they want to know what caused it, how it's being fixed, and how quality will be maintained going forward.

One project stands out as proof that a complaint can turn into a real win. A recurring pattern of shipping damage on steel drums, dents, holes, and leaks caused by drums bumping and rubbing against each other in overseas shipping containers, led Laura's team to study an alternative: HDPE plastic drums. After the material passed stability testing and proved to be a strong fit for the product, SPI moved forward with the switch for Sorbitol Special. The first customer order using the new plastic drums is shipping out this month.

A New Home in Grand Haven

For about 14 years, the Grand Haven team worked out of a set of connected mobile trailers, with shared restrooms sitting oddly in the middle of the common area and doors that slowly stopped closing right as the space aged. The team has since moved into a new building next door to the manufacturing plant, on the shipping and receiving side, featuring an open-concept layout with cubicles and generous common space for meetings and gathering. For Laura, it's become something like a second home.

Looking Ahead

Laura sees the company continually pushing into new areas of growth, something she finds exciting because it means new projects to dig into. One possibility on the horizon: bringing an air classifier process in-house that's currently contracted out to another company, a move she views as a major growth opportunity, along with the space and capacity to bring on more people.