Why does Life Science Manufacturing have ample room for improvement of Operational Excellence?

Competitive pressures are increasing the need for life science companies to innovate on all fronts, including manufacturing. In manufacturing, they must look for new ways on how to improve processes and uncover optimization potential, ensure higher process stability, raise product quality, increase efficiency and discover parameter inter correlations. Life science companies are recognizing that the optimal way to achieve all these objectives at once is digitalization of manufacturing, and they are launching more digitalization projects than ever.

However, in their endeavors for operational excellence through manufacturing digitalization, life science companies are facing six key challenges and risks:

Inability to uncover hidden losses in production: Lack of reliable information about the current performance of production and the status of equipment makes it hard to identify loss factors and quantify losses.

Limited overview and cooperation: Without adequate data and transparency of production processes, management is unable to control the process and promptly react. Moreover, the lack of data makes cooperation among different teams more difficult (e.g. production – maintenance).

Difficult to analyze and improve production: Without comprehensive, orderly and easily accessible production data, it is hard to perform any analyses or develop improvement measures. Data collection from dispersed sources is time consuming and error prone.

Data in paper logs: Too often, recording of production events is limited to manual and paper-based logs, which are exposed to human errors and data loss.

No feedback loop: Absence of real-time and historic production performance data makes it difficult to properly plan production for all resources (materials, equipment, workers).

Inability to benchmark performance: Without standard production metrics and KPIs, it is hard to calculate performance gap among own sites, or to best-in-class ones.

To successfully tackle the above mentioned challenges and risks, Metronik developed MePIS OPEX – an advanced, web-based platform for operational excellence with more than 20 operational and strategic production KPIs.

For more information on how operational excellence could be improved in your production, please contact us at ales.temeljotov@metronik.si.