EPM talks to Bill Goodman, pharma and personal care digital vice president and general manager, Ecolab and Lucia Robles, global senior marketing manager, Ecolab Life Sciences about moving from Pharma 4.0 to Pharma 5.0.
Shutterstock - anan sukprakon
Ecolab talks about moving from Pharma 4.0 to Pharma 5.0. How do you define that shift?
Lucia: The transition from Pharma 4.0 to Pharma 5.0 marks a significant evolution in the industry, whereas Pharma 4.0 was focusing on bringing new technology to streamline operations and accelerate drug development, Pharma 5.0 includes technology to support human work. So basically, when we say human-centric approach through Pharma 5.0, we mean technology is supporting teams to not just increase operational efficiency, but boost sustainability outcomes and initiatives and build more resilient, innovative, and wellbeing industry.
With only 30% of companies expected to succeed in their digital transformation, what do you see as the biggest barriers holding the industry back and how is Ecolab helping to overcome them?
Lucia: According to some stats from our Powering Digital in Pharma e-book, 80% of the companies will attempt digital transformation in the next couple of years, but only 30% of them will succeed. Main barriers include a shortage of specialised expertise (impacting nearly 50% of companies), resistance to change, and challenges in integrating new technologies with existing processes.
At Ecolab, we deliver digital solutions and services, like the ECOLAB3D platform for smart water management, that offers real time monitoring and insights, predictive analytics and dedicated expertise. It’s indeed our global team of experts, which make a difference and help companies integrate new technology in an easier way.
Ecolab 3D TRASAR technology and Ecolab Water Track IQ software are designed to optimise water use. What kind of reductions or efficiencies have you seen in projects?
Lucia: We can say that digital strategies for smart water management can make, reduce or optimise water by up to 44% in the industry.
In our case, thanks to the implementation of 3D TRASAR technology to Ecolab Water Track IQ, we delivered savings to a global pharma leader of $1.5 million in a year which included reduction in water for over 98 million gallons of water, reduction in energy usage by 273 million kWh, and reduction in emissions by 19,000 metric tonnes of CO₂
So, these digital solutions are supporting sustainability and operational efficiency at the same time.
How does Ecolab's eROI framework help with sustainability?
Lucia: Our eROI framework, which stands for Exponential Return of Investment, is designed to quantify results for these three big pillars, which are business performance, operational efficiency, and environmental impact.
eROI framework can help us identify , for sustainability , opportunities in water, energy, CO2 emissions and waste reduction. Not only that, but from an operational point of view, we can identify how to reduce labour hours, increase productivity, or reduce total cost of operations and in the end, we are demonstrating through the implementation of our digital solutions, both economic and environmental outcomes.
We've spoken a lot about sustainability. Does Ecolab have any personal sustainability goals?
Lucia: Sustainability has been at the core of our business for over a hundred years- it's huge for our company. Our main goals by 2030 are to conserve 300 billion gallons of water, which is equal to the needs for water of 1 billion people, not only that, but we aim to reduce 6 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions and we to protect 2 billion people safely preventing 11 million foodborne illnesses.
How far away are we from seeing Digital Twins used routinely in bioprocessing or manufacturing optimisation?
Bill: Digital twins is an interesting topic. I think when we mention it, people have this idea of this huge comprehensive virtual environment that they're going to somehow enter with VR or some other very high-tech solution. Of course that's not necessarily realistic today, and I don't know that it would ever be realistic because it's going be quite complicated and quite expensive to build and maintain. What I think is more practical and certainly in use today are that digital twins have very specific areas of the process.
You might think about how you model a separation or how you model a specific step in your manufacturing process, and then you back into what the challenges are. I know that today some manufacturers are using VR to train people on a specific step of the process.
So, really as I think about digital twins, the question I ask is, “what's the problem you're trying to solve and what are the really essential aspects of that problem that are well suited for some sort of virtual modelling environment?” That environment may not even be visualisation. It might be an environment where you are just using a computer to figure out how to select a resin as an example that's close to home for Ecolab and that then allows the customer to shorten the cycle of real life, physical work by doing something additional in the computer.
I’d say for the targeted applications, they're pretty widely used today, and in many cases, people may not actually call it a digital twin because they envision this kind of very grand thing. I predict that we will continue to see more and more parts of the process integrate. You'll see more and more data sources added, and you'll see more widespread adoption. Will we ever get to that kind of minority report vision of the future? Maybe, maybe not. It all depends on how much value it adds for the customer. And that’s the mindset you need to adopt always when considering digitisation in Pharma.
What is the use of AI in the pharmaceutical manufacturing process?
Bill: Most pharma companies are investing heavily in AI across their operations. While the big headlines focus on drug discovery—with major partnerships between tech and pharma companies aimed at accelerating development—our expertise lies elsewhere. We specialise in process development, scale-up, and manufacturing. Our focus remains on helping customers develop robust processes, scale efficiently, and ultimately produce drugs with exceptional quality and efficiency. For us, we're really thinking about how to leverage technology alongside people, very closely aligned to what we're calling pharma 5.0 now and really how in the manufacturing environment we can make people more effective.
Effectiveness is really two fold. One is how do they do their job more quickly, more efficiently? The second is how do we allow them to avoid mistakes? How do we allow them to prevent actions or activities that might compromise either the quality or the throughput of the manufacturing environment?
For us, that’s really about how do we better integrate digital tools into the environment.
If you think about the manufacturing environment today, in many cases there's paper documents that are still used. Those paper documents open you up to a variety of challenges. It could be the legibility of handwriting, it could be the fact that there might be one single document in a room that four people need to interact with.
Our focus is aligning processes with facility operations and enabling digital tools such as automated connectivity, potentially cameras, and AI to work alongside people. This enhances output quality, consistency, and robustness.
Blockchain is mentioned as a solution to counterfeiting. Do you see this as a widespread adoption of blockchain in the pharmaceutical industry?
Bill: This is another interesting one, similar to digital twins. It's almost technology first and, and problem second. Obviously, counterfeiting and product quality is a very important piece of the equation.
Blockchain as a technology is very well suited for types of interactions between people that are basically all electronic. So, if you think about financial interactions, it's quite good at that. Part of our problem is that if it comes to counterfeiting a physical pharmaceutical product, very often, it has little to do with the data.
There are times where the data is forged or falsified and that leads to some sort of product quality issue. But our biggest problem is - how do you ensure that what's captured in the digital record is accurately representing what's happening in the physical world and I do think there's opportunities to improve that.
As we talked about before with digital twins and some of the other AI technologies. How can we better enable data capture without people writing things down? Today, even in digital, it's very often that someone will enter something with a keyboard. That data entry opens the process up to errors but also opens the process up to falsification.
As we're thinking about technical solutions to the counterfeiting problem, we're starting to think about how you capture the environment without relying on a human to enter things or to click boxes or to use a keyboard or a mouse, not just because of intentional falsification, but errors as well.
So, as we look forward, we're certainly wanting to make sure that on the digital side, we have accurate and secure audit trails and secure data. In most cases, that's already encrypted. Could there be opportunities to have technology like blockchain improve that? Possibly, yes.
I also think you must consider the sort of computationally intensive reality of something like blockchain that continues to get more and more challenging to use as the ledger grows larger. We are making sure that the digital records are secure and are accurate and maintain their audit trails.
But our bigger focus is - how do you make sure what happens in the real world is accurately represented when you look into the digital world.