For pharmaceuticals manufacturers, progressing digitalisation and moving to the cloud has been notoriously slow, and misperceptions of what moving to the cloud entails have been a significant factor in this lack of adoption.
Manufacturers with established legacy systems are often unduly concerned about the security aspects of moving to cloud. They have also been hesitant to invest in new infrastructure, even though the long-term savings offered by cloud platforms outweigh its short-term costs.
Despite this lag, the move from on-premise, local software installation, to cloud has become more commonplace. Many manufacturers have taken an intermediate hybrid cloud approach, which refers to a mixed computing, storage, and services environment made up of on-premises infrastructure, private cloud services and a public cloud.
The trends of digital transformation and the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE) Pharma 4.0 initiative have laid the foundations for the move to hybrid cloud. The ongoing need to drive speed-to-market and to be ready for demand spikes has been put into focus by Covid-19.
In line with this, pharmaceutical manufacturers are adopting hybrid cloud infrastructure to enhance operational efficiencies, reduce IT burden, drive costs down and improve data accessibility and analysis.
This migration is gathering pace. Thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT), the breadth of connected equipment and systems available to pharmaceutical companies has been growing.
Along with the goal of delivering medicines to market faster and minimising supply chain disruptions, another reason for embracing cloud solutions is the growing amount of data that accompanies a drug manufacturing project. The complexity of modalities being developed for therapeutics has resulted in more variables to measure, meaning larger data files and greater data volume.
There is a real need for pharmaceutical companies to aggregate data from multiple sources, including manufacturing, lab systems and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions. By aggregating those data, businesses have greater opportunity to mine it, creating an integrated overview of how the whole business is performing. Cloud solutions can augment validated on-premise solutions and data can be extracted to feed machine learning. Cloud can also support the implementation of advanced digital solutions in remote locations with limited IT support.
Many pharmaceutical companies are starting to think through applications and use cases around cloud, but questions remain.
What sort of data from manufacturing, labs or financial systems should be in the cloud, for instance and what should reside at plant level? What kind of cloud-based applications should they use? What is the data strategy pharmaceutical companies should follow, in the pursuit of greater accessibility to data for sharing, analysis and reducing the IT burden?
The biggest question, however, is how can companies take advantage of the cloud now? Simply, the first stepis identifying the pain points; building strategy, aligning with the company’s business initiatives,and securing buy-in. The second is to determine key performance indicators (KPIs), plan and implement pilots, then assess and scale.
New cloud-based approaches using AI and predictive capabilities are already delivering gains in the efficiency and time-to-market of batch releases, for example, resolving the bottlenecks around reviewing of data. Electronic record-keeping and the reduction of human error mean organisations benefit from fewer lost and increased data integrity.
Step-by-step
Process predictions is one area pharmaceutical companies often focus on, especially if quality or reliability may beat risk. Implementing predictive technologies is often the first step pharmaceuticals companies take on their move to cloud because it is lower risk. The results raised by predictive technologies around likely equipment failures further down the line are early flags that, if acted upon, will prevent problems occurring later,and minimise unplanned downtime.
With relevant data collected and integrated seamlessly, the workflow can be made more efficient with datain one place, and checks and controls can be handled electronically by automated systems, both on-premise and ultimately in the cloud where there is even greater accessibility to data.
Reaping the rewards
Most pharmaceutical companies can benefit from cost savings. The cost of building and scaling an on-premise IT set-up can be exorbitant. By moving to the cloud, pharmaceutical companies can offload much of this.
Having data available in the cloud drives efficiencies. In the development process, firms can start to circumvent the process of having to churn through reports and spreadsheets.
Starting out on the journey to the cloud is becoming an imperative for pharmaceutical companies. They don’t have to do everything in one go but by getting underway they canuse datato drive business advantage and competitive edge.