How to avoid pharma's Theranos effect
In the wake of the Theranos disaster, Dave Edwards, executive vice president of sales at MasterControl, explains why digital transformation is key if pharma companies are to achieve transparency throughout product development.
Not long ago, everyone was clamouring over Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes drafted a captivating pitch, courted investors and even partnered with Walgreens to open blood testing centres in California and Arizona. Theranos seemed too good to be true, and it was.
Holmes and former-Theranos president Ramesh Balwani misled the public through a systematic lack of transparency. The company did not have peer-reviewed evidence showing the safety and effectiveness of its machine, and soon holes were poked in Holmes’ narrative, leading to the company’s ultimate demise.
Although multiple lessons can be learned from Theranos’ failure, one is abundantly clear: digitising processes and data is essential for control and transparency throughout the product development life cycle. For manufacturers, digitising can offer a competitive advantage through understanding customers’ propensity to buy and enable streamlined operational processes and optimised demand forecasting. Greater efficiency is additionally attained through more actionable data, visibility to identify and address problems quickly, and predictive maintenance programmes that get products to market faster.
5 Best Practices for Successfully Inciting Digital Change
To embark on a successful digital transformation project, manufacturers should adhere to the following best practices:
Audit legacy systems and assets
Analyse existing systems, processes, tasks and assets, including those already leveraging digitisation. Survey processes including material requirements planning tools for inventory control, materials management and procurement planning, manufacturing execution systems, shop floor control solutions, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. These all have overlapping functionality, so identifying commonalities will establish a digital thread that connects and integrates systems and provides a cohesive data record.
Foster a culture of open mindedness
Manufacturers must recognise employee fears and educate them on the realities of digital transformation. Discuss which automated tasks are activities employees don’t want to undertake, like pulling and loading data. By introducing predictive algorithms, employees can make better decisions and free up time for more rewarding, interesting and higher-value-add activities.
Start small but work fast
Begin with a paperless pilot in one department. If a paper-based system is in place for maintaining device history records (DHRs), consider replacing this system with a closed-loop manufacturing execution system offering faster detection and prevention of problems, along with improved investigations to find and correct root causes. Improved data consistency across plants and the supply chain can be realised, and intuitive dashboards for key metrics enable continuous improvement.
Gather user feedback continually
Take advantage of your subject matter experts, and make it clear their input is essential to successfully digitising. Asking how and where they think processes can be refined is a crucial step, not just as you embark on a digital transformation initiative, but throughout the project.
Invest in training
Employees should be well-equipped to perform their daily tasks without interruption or confusion, receive training for new updates throughout a digital transformation initiative and have continual access to user-friendly support resources and digital transformation leads. Don’t make the mistake of inciting digital change and walking away; expecting employees to adjust and blindly incorporate new processes won’t result in success.
Longterm relevance requires digital transformation
According to IDC, digital transformation efforts will reach an estimated $1.97 trillion by 2022, but despite enthusiastic spending, past research indicates 70% of large-scale digital transformation projects fail. Organisations often neglect to engender company-wide support, don’t set clear, achievable goals or consider the unique needs or goals specific to their business and make the mistake of digitising too quickly.
As technology advances and customer demands intensify, current systems including inefficient, insecure and costly paper-based and hybrid processes, are falling short. It’s imperative the manufacturing floor is digitally transformed and connected to quality to avoid the Theranos trap, while also remaining competitive and thrive in an age of data-driven intelligence and smart manufacturing.