As the pharmaceutical industry continues to experience a great wave of growth, it is hard not to mention advanced manufacturing. As a result, advanced manufacturing has become a buzzword often used when discussing the future of factories, including pharmaceutical manufacturing.
Combining its various elements aids effective pharma production while it brings flexibility. So stay glued to this blog post to understand advanced manufacturing and its benefits to your pharmaceutical and biotech company.
What is Advanced Manufacturing?
Advanced manufacturing in pharma means using innovative technologies to create existing and new products. In other words, it refers to cutting-edge production methods that are more automated and computerized.
This manufacturing technology term is highly applicable to pharma and biotech organizations to address product shortages and improve drug quality, in a compliant and timely manner.
This innovative technology also speeds up the time to market (TTM) of pharmaceutical products. Besides, it includes every production activity that relies on computation, automation, networking, and software.
Why is Advanced Manufacturing Important for Pharma?
The pharma industry, among other fields, places a premium on accuracy in drug production. This is because production errors can bring severe consequences. The industry therefore adopts advanced manufacturing to prevent those consequences. This section will outline why advanced manufacturing is important to your pharma company.
1. Drug Shortages
It is not unusual for drug shortages to happen. Shortages could be due to delays, non-supply of raw materials, low quality, natural disasters, or regulatory issues.
Advanced manufacturing helps avoid all of these issues by making plans ahead, maintaining a demand-supply balance, improving drug quality, etc.
2. Boosting Manufacturing Capacities
Advanced manufacturing improves the manufacturing capacities of pharma manufacturing workers. Likewise, it optimizes the rate at which pharmaceutical machines function, especially when automated or computerized.
Also, advanced manufacturing aids pharmaceutical and biotech companies to develop effective measures for drugs to counter illnesses, injuries, diseases, etc.
3. Quality Control
Monitoring production in a pharma manufacturing plant can be burdensome. However, using an innovative method – advanced manufacturing, can ease the process. This would ensure that drugs go through the necessary stages and meet regulatory specifications.
4. Minimizing Errors
Manual production processes can lead to errors that could cost pharma manufacturing companies money and raw materials. However, production will occur without errors and loss when manufacturing is processed using software, automated machines, etc.
Benefits of Advanced Manufacturing for Pharma
Innovative ideas in various fields will continue to make lives easier and work processes effective. Therefore, we shall now touch on the benefits of advanced manufacturing to pharmaceutical companies.
1. Lean Manufacturing
As a pharma company, adopting advanced manufacturing helps minimize waste and maximize productivity. It helps you focus on producing quality products while avoiding wasting material resources, time, and money.
When you embrace innovative technologies in your pharma company, you can avoid overprocessing, mistakes, and unnecessary movements that can cause a delay in production.
For instance, when there’s a mistake, it will cost your company more time and resources to fix them. It could also weigh your workers down because they would have to spend their energy on the same task rather than getting something else done.
2. Improved Quality
Quality is essential when manufacturing pharmaceutical products. Regulatory bodies like the FDA (Food & Drug Administration) even have guidelines that pharmaceutical companies must follow to ensure product quality.
Advanced manufacturing helps you to become more consistent and precise when manufacturing. It also makes your product effective and reliable to use.
3. Reduced Manufacturing Lead Time
Manufacturing pharma products and getting them to customers might take forever if the processes aren’t optimized. So reducing manufacturing time and supplying customers without delay is another benefit of advanced manufacturing in pharma.
This innovative method reduces lead time through inventory management software. It also does this by ordering small quantities of materials for production.
4. Increased Innovative Ideas
Innovative manufacturing brings more inventive ideas to grow your pharmaceutical and biotech company. In addition, when you computerize your manufacturing processes, you will have more time to research and develop new products.
With the many demands of the pharma industry, it is crucial to view production with a new lens – advanced manufacturing. The manufacturing method eases production, facilitates compliance, minimizes errors, and avoids waste of resources.
OpsTrakker unlocks these benefits through its eLogBooks and eForms. OpsTrakker employs a variety of tools to realize the benefits of advanced manufacturing. These electronic tools enable compliant process documentation and enable review by exception, for staff everywhere.
OpsTrakker facilitates compliance, improves manufacturing operations, and unlocks your manufacturing data. With this streamlined approach, OpsTrakker can support any operations, from life sciences pharmaceuticals to biotech, medical devices and cell and gene therapy, to kickstart your digital transformation. Further, OpsTrakker enables a seamless IoT ecosystem, in a lightweight manner, to help you achieve high-value business results.
Are you ready to kickstart your digital transformation? Kindly contact us at OpsTrakker today to learn more today.