Plant Information Management System Speeds Pharmaceutical Production

In mid-May, Eli Lilly and Co. (Indianapolis, IN) signed what amounts to a renewed and expanded contract with Simuation Sciences, Inc. (Brea, CA) for SimSci's AIM\AT software. AIM\AT is a plant information-management system (PIMS) that SimSci acquired last year when it bought Biles & Associates.

"We've been using the AIM technology since 1989 as a PIM tool. We are pleased with SimSci's commitment to the AIM product line and feel confident in extending our contract an additional three years," noted Paul Brandenburg, associate information consultant at Lilly.

While noting that many of the details of the Lilly installation are proprietary, John Hook, a SimSci sales director, mentioned a number of features of AIM\AT that are important to companies like Lilly. "AIM\AT is a suite of products that capture process control data, compress it, and store it for rapid retrieval," he said. It works with both continuous processes, which tend to be run by distributed control systems, and batch-oriented production, which tends to be managed by programmable-logic controllers. Plant managers use it to keep records on production runs, and to deliver data in a usable form to plant-optimization systems (which SimSci also offers).

The data-storage benefit is especially important to clients like Lilly, who must keep thorough records on hand for validating pharmaceutical production. Hook observed that a stand-out feature of AIM\AT is its transparent redundancy. "An entirely redundant server, comprising both hardware and software, is part of the system," he said. "The backup is able not only to capture data when the primary system is down, but also to automatically update its records when the system returns to operation."

The generation 1.0 version of AIM\AT was announced a couple years ago as one of the first PIMS to be rewritten completely for Windows NT. It features ODBC- and OLE-compliant database formats, and can interface with enterprise resource-planning systems like SAP's R/3 system. At the same time, SimSci continues to maintain an Open/VMS version for plants still running on Digital Equipment computers. A new 2.0.0 version is expected to be released early this summer.

By Nick Basta

For more information: Simulation Sciences, Inc., 601 Valencia Ave., Suite 100, Brea, CA 92823. Tel: 714-579-0412; Fax: 714-579-7468.