How digitalization improves the pharmaceutical industry and your business

By becoming a Digital Enterprise, you can reduce the time it takes for medications and pharmaceuticals to reach the market.

Quality is critical in the pharmaceutical industry: cutting-edge research, excellent processes, and flawless products are what make you a winner. However, you must continue to improve in order to stay ahead of the competition: new diseases necessitate new cures, and increased competition necessitates faster, leaner processes in all aspects of your operations.

By combining the real and digital worlds, you can take efficiency, quality, and productivity in your pharmaceutical value chain to the next level with our proven digital solutions. Let us win this race against time together!

Disruption as a catalyst for digital transformation

More than ever before, the pharmaceutical industry has to increase their ability to react faster to the market demands. Indeed, your R&D departments are constantly looking for innovative solutions and partnerships in order to “save humanity”, think of the Covid-19 pandemic, or to alleviate patient pathologies.

Today, the innovation and the development of new treatments are at the heart of your business. These rapid adaptation capabilities and the need for resiliency and agility ensured that the pharmaceutical industry is one of the most technologically progressive ecosystems. The digitalization of the production lines in the pharmaceutical industry is necessary if you want to be fast and rigorous.  

This need to be ready to market in a faster pace has encouraged the pharmaceutical industry to search for ways to simplify their decision-making process and to get more flexible production lines, so they can adapt faster when a change in the product is needed.

As research and innovation take a lot of time, paying attention to the future trends and anticipating problems and legal or regulatory requirements is also crucial for their industry.      

Which solutions and technologies can help you

Tracking tools

Thanks to good tracking tools for process cycle time and tank preparation (CIP/SIP), you will be able to list the most important reasons of time losses and, therefore, find long-term solutions instead of quick fixes on the floor. That is where process engineering can intervene in order to optimize the overall chemical, physical, and biological processes.  

Electronic Batch Records

We are sure you also have to “force” the electronic batch records because certain parameters from the process are not in accordance with the Standard Operating Procedures. This can lead to holdups in the process. Operations always have to be conducted in accordance with the SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures), so when there is a need for a slight deviation, for example to take extra process samples, a Batch Record Attachment (BRA) is obligatory (Compliance).

As these documents are batch-bound, for every new batch a new copy of said BRA is needed. The problem with these BRAs (Batch Record Attachment) is that they are all on paper, and not everybody in production knows how many or which BRAs are in circulation. There is a need for proper tracking tools, or even better, to make all of this digital and fool-proof.

For example, manual interpretations of clearly distinguishable defects, needed to validate the products, can be digitized with the help of Computer vision systems. These systems reduce the workload and assist it in this process. However, we know that there are not yet clearly defined strategies in how to operationalize and validate these technologies in the pharmaceutical industry. Ideally, a clear MLOps platform and strategy can help.

Data science

Due to this manual work, data availability is a big challenge too. Smart Automation and robotized processes are key to make your data available, to analyse it correctly to, on the long term, increase your productivity and reduce the risks of contamination.

In addition, you should strive to make data science ‘democratic’, meaning that you do not need a data science degree to perform meaningful analyses on your process. It can automatically search for patterns in your historical data, based on an event that you specify. These kinds of implementable tools are great for on-the-spot problem solving and give you clear Data Visualisation & Analytics for the future.

Combining Smart Automation with Predictive Maintenance, aiming the minimization of the equipment downtime and shutdowns, is the perfect combo for real production optimization.

But where and how to start your digital transformation pharmaceutical industry?

If all of this seems overwhelming or impossible to achieve on your own, do not worry. At Otofacto, we have the right knowledge and expertise of your industrial challenges and industrial and technological expertise to help you in this industry 4.0 journey. We believe that the advent of digital technology in manufacturing organizations can lead to untap the digital potential of your entire production system.

We help you with:

1. Smart Automation
2. Process engineering
3. Maintenance & Reliability
4. Continuous improvement

Let’s see where this digitalization of your industry can get you

We globally check your overall Industry 4.0 maturity to give you a clear customized strategy and concrete recommendations for the implementation of industry analytics for every discipline.

Let’s improve digitalization in the pharmaceutical industry, together!