Smart Pharma
Much has been written about how digitalization will progress in the “risk-averse” pharma industry. Most pharma professionals acknowledge that digital technology will absolutely play a widening role in pharma’s future, but not without the industry overcoming significant hurdles.
The pandemic put pharma’s digital progress to the test — and according to this year’s annual Pharma Manufacturing Smart Pharma survey results, the industry is performing better than anticipated. Formerly “nice to have” digital technologies, such as remote collaboration tools, became essential for continuing operations amid the pandemic.
But even prior to the pandemic, one area of the plant that has been transformed by IIoT is equipment maintenance. Smart technology has the ability to take maintenance to a new level — enabling plants to transcend the traditional preventative style of regularly scheduled maintenance to a condition-based predictive maintenance.
Our winning smart pharma innovation comes from a collaboration between BISTel and Korea’s largest mobile operator, SK Telecom. The pair launched the GrandView Asset Performance Management (APM) solution at last fall’s AWS Re-invent trade show in Las Vegas. The Grandview APM solution integrates SK Telecom’s big data analytics and IoT technology platform with BISTel’s manufacturing and engineering expertise, and the result is a solution that provides for continuous monitoring of the health and performance of factory equipment, pumps, motors, fans, and other critical assets and showcases powerful data visualization for all users.
The asset health index and AI predictive analytics technology provides users with an RUL (remaining useful life) prediction, pinpointing when assets will fail. Users can connect the GrandView APM’s prediction to their plant’s CMMS, EAM or ERP systems, automatically generating a work order scan to order parts and perform maintenance — thus minimizing or even eliminating system downtime.
The cloud-based solution’s AI enabled applications and reporting could be game-changers, providing pharma manufacturers 100 percent visibility into the performance of their equipment, production processes and engineering systems. Importantly, BISTel says the Grandview APM offers easy data integration with ERP, MES and supply chain management systems and requires minimal IT support. The smart application can access and gather information from formerly siloed environments across the pharma plant to create new insights that can help deliver drug products to market faster, with less risk, made by equipment that lasts longer.
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