Many life sciences companies perform production planning, scheduling, and monitoring in isolated proprietary systems, which slows responses to changing conditions or problems. Plants are often managed in isolation, and systems do not support coordination among factories. Long production line downtimes, excessive waste, and high inventory levels often result. Even worse, without easy communication among factories, organizational learning becomes a challenge. Mistakes may be repeated across manufacturing plants and additional production batches may be lost.
When managers cannot monitor the manufacturing process in real time, they can face worrisome delays in detecting quality issues. Much production time is lost as life sciences firms investigate problems and work to solve them. Not only is production line utilization negatively affected, but in the worst case regulatory action may result, jeopardizing the entire business.
Without a comprehensive, real-time view of manufacturing operations, managers lack the information they need to best allocate production resources and ensure regulatory compliance. As inefficiencies mount, costs become harder to control and system upgrades become more challenging.
Life sciences firms need easy-to-use solutions that provide the right information to the right people – at the right time in the right place in the right format. These solutions should collect, share, and store information from disparate sources in an accessible, intuitive format. They should aggregate data across business functions and manufacturing sites in real time — fostering collaboration and giving managers greater visibility into manufacturing performance. The solutions must help provide security, which will facilitate regulatory compliance.
