The margin for error is extremely low in a critical sector like manufacturing, where accuracy, efficiency, and time to delivery are indispensable. These aspects become even more crucial in pharmaceutical manufacturing, a critical sector that is always in high demand, especially following the COVID-19 pandemic.
The responsibility now falls on contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs) that partner with pharmaceutical and biotech companies. These organizations are tasked with producing products at a rapid pace and in larger volumes. A robust and highly efficient manufacturing process is the only way these companies could meet the increasing demand while maintaining proper quality. However, that is far easier said than done!
The challenges of a CDMO
The role of a CDMO is to partner with pharmaceutical companies, receive the drug formulations, manufacture, and ship the medicines. However, an increased demand can pose significant challenges in the manufacturing process.
Scalability: Pharmaceutical products are in great demand worldwide. A CDMO needs to anticipate the market demands and be able to scale up the production to meet the demands of their clients. Any delay in scaling up can disrupt the entire supply chain and cause major setbacks for clients and end-users.
Quality control: While manufacturing products en masse and ensuring proper time to market is important, it is imperative to ensure that the products are of the highest quality. Any compromise of quality affects the patients around the globe who trust the medicines, and also pose a serious threat of damaging the CDMO’s reputation.
Compliance: Pharmaceutical manufacturers are expected to adhere to strict regulations to ensure that safe and effective medicines are produced. For CDMOs maintaining compliance with regulatory bodies throughout the production process is critical. They risk losing their clients and, even worse, losing the permission to produce if they fail to comply with the regulations.
How IT plays a crucial role in CDMOs
Pharmaceutical manufacturing is a multi-step, complex process that involves receiving the drug formulations to batch production, packaging, and delivery. To ensure an optimal output without any quality issues or defects, CDMOs deploy a range of systems like a building management system, inventory management system, or programmable logic controllers.
These systems are supported by their IT network, which is a combination of data centers hosting servers, network devices, and applications providing visibility into the key parameters and operations of these systems.
Any disruptions to their IT network performance, lag in the application, or outage could pose a potential risk of failing to perform the necessary quality checks, resulting in a substandard output. This is why CDMOs rely on robust monitoring solutions to monitor their IT operations and avert any outages or performance slump. This ensures their manufacturing operations are seamless.
A globally renowned CDMO, faced significant time delays in troubleshooting issues, which eventually led to the delayed time-to-market and even posed a potential risk of a batch failure.
How did they turn things around? By investing in OpManager. The outcome was a huge saving of $1 million and a significant reduction in MTTR from three hours to just 30 minutes. Curious to understand how they achieved this. Read the detailed case study to discover!
