Andreas Eschbach, founder and CEO of eschbach, explores how embracing 360° connectivity can break down information silos and help build a ‘visual factory’, offering accurate real-time data and insights, better communication across departments, and more empowered decision-making.
eschbach
Over the past few decades, the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry has undergone a remarkable digital revolution, bringing with it a plethora of new technologies, platforms, and processes.
The digitalisation of the industry has undoubtedly helped to streamline – and in some cases even eliminate - repetitive, laborious, or time-consuming manual tasks. However, it is not without its challenges.
Indeed, the average plant worker now has an assortment of different communication tools and methods at their fingertips – email, telephone, video conferencing platforms, physical shift logs, and spreadsheets, to name a few.
In theory, this should improve communication, but in practice it can lead to a lack of transparency and oversight.
What are information silos?
This is because the integration of numerous disparate communication methods onto one shopfloor leads to the creation of information silos – data or information that is ‘trapped’ within a particular system or platform, and is unable to be communicated outside of it.
While this is a challenge in any workplace, it is a particular concern in a 24/7 plant environment where staff are operating on opposite shift patterns and handovers are common. For instance, if a critical incident occurs on a night shift, it is imperative that this information is effectively communicated across all levels of the business – from the morning meeting and the handover to the following shift manager, all the way up to senior management.
However, depending on how this information is recorded and communicated, it may not necessarily be visible to other members of staff – for example, if it was physically noted down, or if it was recorded in a platform that not all colleagues may not have access to.
This can lead to differing viewpoints on key issues or misalignment between teams, resulting in a shopfloor that is fractured and inefficient. In the long term, this also creates a significant barrier to continuous improvement initiatives and root cause analysis if key information is being routinely missed.
Less is more
When it comes to communication and collaboration, the best way to set your plant up for success is to establish a single source of truth across all departments, allowing the maintenance, quality control, operational excellence, shift, and management teams to all pull in the same direction. To do this, all plant communication – from shift handovers, task and event tracking, batch status, and critical insights – should be consolidated into a singular platform, such as Shiftconnector.
Starting with the most fundamental task – shift handovers – having a single enterprise manufacturing platform allows shift handovers to be standardised and completed entirely digitally, meaning no more patchworks of shift logs, Excel spreadsheets, and physical notes. In practice, this ensures that all key information is passed over from one shift to the next without risk of it becoming siloed.
The effects that this can have on productivity are tangible. For Bayer AG’s drug substance finishing plant (DSFP) in Charlottenburg, Berlin, Shiftconnector allowed over 20 disparate communication platforms to be consolidated into one, while also offering savings of up to an hour a day per shift handover.
While consolidating all plant data into a singular platform may naturally raise concerns around information overload, this is where Shiftconnector’s task management and tagging functions come into play.
For plant managers or shift leaders, tasks can be assigned directly to other members of staff via the platform. With a clear label of priority, responsibilities and instructions can always be transmitted clearly withoutrisk of anything being missed. If a key incident or data point needs to be brought to the attention of a specific team, it can be flagged, alerting it to the relevant members of staff, while also being automatically added to the agenda of the next respective meeting. Critically, this also allows for escalation up through levels of the business, even up to senior management, helping to foster a bottom-up approach while ensuring transparency.
Building the visual factory
Perhaps the greatest benefit to establishing a single source of truth on the shopfloor lies in your data, as integrating IT systems, machines, and the knowledge of human operators into one system with no information silos creates a much clearer picture of the plant as a whole. In turn, this can lead to a more accurate data set, which facilitates more empowered decision-making.
This is best reflected in the form of a ‘visual factory’ using digital tier collaboration dashboards. This allows KPIs relating to people, safety, quality, delivery, and cost to be tracked via a visual interface, with the option to create custom set-ups in line with the demands of a given team or plant. This allows safety incidents, quality deviations, and overall performance to all be easily gauged at a glance.
When underpinned by a system with 360° connectivity across teams, their provides the major benefit of updating in real time, offering up-to-minute data at every level of the plant.
For instance, should a shift operator note an issue during the production process, such as a faulty sensor, the observation can be logged and will instantly be visible to all of the relevant teams. An alert will then be sent to both the maintenance team and next shift in real time, with the status of the issue tracked. Here, an issue that may have otherwise found itself buried in the shift handover can be communicated to the right people at the right time, meaning it is no longer at risk of becoming a ‘missing piece’ in root cause analysis.
Where continuous improvement is concerned, this can be a major benefit in spotting repeat incidents before they become a long-term operational challenge. The operational excellence team, for example, when supplied with the most accurate data possible, will be able to more easily identify emerging incident trends, with the option of expediting this via waterfall and pareto charts.
Smarter science
Moreover, when everything is in one place and nothing is siloed, data can be easily leveraged for the benefit of plant workers – tapping into the plant’s existing shift records to help facilitate problem resolution and root cause analysis. This is especially true where the integration of AI is concerned, with tools such as the Shiftconnector Artificial Manufacturing Intelligence (SAMI) module proving particularly revolutionary in this regard.
For instance, if an operator runs into a problem with the pH of a particular bioreactor, they can use the AI to search the system for similar incidents from past shift records. The AI can then suggest a number of proven human solutions from the past, such as checking the pH sensor health, or adjusting the dissolved oxygen. For more in-depth analysis, a conversational interface even allows users to ‘talk’ to their plant’s data as if they were discussing with a colleague.
Crucially, all results are presented back to the operator in a matter of seconds and are backed up by past plant records, demonstrating a clear benefit of establishing a 360° platform and eliminating siloed information.
Setting your plant up for success
Pharma manufacturers must now face up to a hard truth – everywhere that disparate communication exists, so too do information silos, with their prevalence only growing the more communication methods are in place. Perhaps most concerningly, these silos may exist without the conscious knowledge of staff – providing an ongoing hidden hindrance to continuous improvement initiatives and the like. Here, the only proven method of eliminating information silos for good is to establish a single source of truth.
All plant data – whether from the MES, shift logs, or operational data compiled from sensors – must be fed into a single platform, in turn creating a 360° digital ecosystem, and breaking down information silos. When they are laid out, we believe that the benefits that this can offer to long-term operational excellence and continuous improvement initiatives are clear.