Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Plant Automation
Industry Challenges
Manufacturing across the world is facing a global shift from the west to east. In their quest to remain competitive against low-cost production countries like China, India, Thailand and Mexico, manufacturers are devising a two-fold strategy – towards outsourcing a bulk of the manufacturing work to the east, to cite an example the API outsourcing from India and focusing on end-of-the-line assembly and testing processes); and building efficiencies in manufacturing processes that are too critical to be let out to third parties.
The challenges faced by manufacturers can be grouped as:Operational Challenges
- Achieving concurrency in all operations
- Reducing production waste and product environmental impact to "near zero"
- Reconfiguring manufacturing enterprises rapidly in response to changing needs and opportunities
- Developing innovative manufacturing processes and products
- Shrinking product lifecycle, leading to criticality of identifying defects early
- Poor plant efficiency in a distributed manufacturing environment
- Slow adoption and conformance to newer, stringent regulations and industry standards
- Late detection of defects and poor warning systems leading to expensive product warranty recalls
- Transforming information gathered from a vast array of sources into useful knowledge for making effective decisions
- Manual paper-based systems, leading to inefficiencies
- Rigid non-standard homegrown systems
- Lack of real-time systems across the global supply chain
- Inefficient integration of plant systems with enterprise IT and automation systems
Differentiators
- One stop shop - consulting and delivery capabilities under one roof
- Usability Engineering Services
- Improved end-user experience and productivity
- Architecture Validation Services
- For Scaling, high-performing applications
- Only Indian offshore vendor with focused group delivering solutions for plants
- Solutions addressing specific industry challenges
- Mix of domain consultants with manufacturing knowledge and IT consultants with factory IT applications knowledge
- Multi-domain capabilities across discrete manufacturing industries including Life Sciences, Semiconductors, Automotive, and Hi-Tech
- Internationalization and Localization Services for global applications
- High-quality, Commercial-grade software with product engineering focus towards applications
- Memberships to leading forums in the domain like WBF, OPC and ISA
Service Offerings
Offshore IT vendors have been predominantly concentrating on R&D and sales/marketing and little has been done to improve the manufacturing and distribution operations of the industry. HCL has taken it upon itself to develop solution frameworks specific to the - Life Sciences industry that cover all aspects of the API manufacturing cycle.
HCL's MES solutions provide immediately usable information to the right people at the right time to help them make timely, well-informed decisions. The main aim is to address the gaps between shop floor & control systems and the ERP systems in place thereby creating a series of synchronized and coordinated information links that results in tighter control over manufacturing activities and, ultimately, in first-time, end-product quality and production repeatability.
HCL aims to provide software services and solutions for pharmaceutical manufacturers and manufacturing ISVs focused on the solution map given below:
