Smart Manufacturing Solutions Drive Digital Transformation in Life Sciences

By Craig Resnick

There are a number of market trends shaping the life sciences industry. Global population and life expectancies are increasing. Globalization of markets, especially the growing pool of middle class consumers in emerg-ing economies, provides an increasing revenue base for large life sciences com-panies, but also creates the challenge of dealing with multiple global regulatory standards. It also facilitates strong local competition, which can increase price and margin pressures. Globalization cre-ates the need for distributed operations that require an ecosystem approach in place of the traditional supply chain. This also creates possible issues of data integrity. At the same time, pressures to lower costs have never been greater, with growing competition from generic drug manufacturers, patent cliffs and pressures from bulk buyers.

This is why innovation in manufacturing technology has never been more important and in greater demand than right now. Life sciences companies seek continuous process manufacturing solutions to improve product quali-ty and reduce costs, as well as solutions for batch and single-use equipment in bio-technology based processes. Innovative companies are now applying industry-specific Smart Manufacturing solutions to reduce time to value and improve efficiency and asset utilization while ensuring product and data integrity, regulatory compliance and safety.