Competitive pressures are increasing the need for life science companies to innovate on all fronts, including manufacturing. In manufacturing, they must look for new ways on how to improve processes and uncover optimisation potential, ensure higher process stability, raise product quality, increase efficiency and discover parameter intercorrelations.
Life science companies are recognising that the optimal way to achieve all these objectives at once is the digitalisation of manufacturing, and they are launching more digitalisation projects than ever.
However, in their endeavours for operational excellence through manufacturing digitalisation, life science companies are facing six key challenges and risks:
Inability to uncover hidden losses in production: Lack of reliable information about the current performance of production and the status of equipment makes it hard to identify loss factors and quantify losses.
Limited overview and cooperation: Without adequate data and transparency of production processes, management is unable to control the process and promptly react. Moreover, the lack of data makes cooperation among different teams more difficult (e.g. production – maintenance).
Difficult to analyse and improve production: Without comprehensive, orderly and easily accessible production data, it is hard to perform any analyses or develop improvement measures. Data collection from dispersed sources is time-consuming and error-prone.
Data in paper logs: Too often, recording of production events are limited to manual and paper-based logs, which are exposed to human errors and data loss.
No feedback loop: Absence of real-time and historic production performance data makes it difficult to properly plan production for all resources (materials, equipment, workers).
Inability to benchmark performance: Without standard production metrics and KPIs, it is hard to calculate performance gap among own sites, or to best-in-class ones.
To successfully tackle the abovementioned challenges and risks, Metronik developed MePIS OPEX – an advanced, web-based platform for operational excellence with more than 20 operational and strategic production KPIs.
For more information on how operational excellence could be improved in your production, please fill out the enquiry form attached to this page.