The high cost of manufacturing operations
Despite rigid product-quality regulations, pharmaceutical firms never made cost-effective manufacturing a top priority. A relatively low cost of goods sold meant bad batches could simply be thrown away. No longer. Increased regulatory demands to ensure product quality and intensified cost pressures are driving life sciences companies to seek greater efficiencies from their manufacturing operations.
Microsoft provides the application platform and core infrastructure to enable real-time manufacturing visibility.
Many life sciences companies perform production planning, scheduling, and monitoring in isolated proprietary systems, which slows responses to changing conditions or problems. Plants are often managed in isolation, and systems do not support coordination among factories. Long production line downtimes, excessive waste, and high inventory levels often result. Even worse, without easy communication among factories, organizational learning becomes a challenge. Mistakes may be repeated across manufacturing plants and additional production batches may be lost.
When managers cannot monitor the manufacturing process in real time, they can face worrisome delays in detecting quality issues. Much production time is lost as life sciences firms investigate problems and work to solve them. Not only is production line utilization negatively affected, but in the worst case regulatory action may result, jeopardizing the entire business.
Without a comprehensive, real-time view of manufacturing operations, managers lack the information they need to best allocate production resources and ensure regulatory compliance. As inefficiencies mount, costs become harder to control and system upgrades become more challenging.
Agility is key
Life sciences firms need easy-to-use solutions that provide the right information to the right people - at the right time in the right place in the right format. These solutions should collect, share, and store information from disparate sources in an accessible, intuitive format. They should aggregate data across business functions and manufacturing sites in real time -- fostering collaboration and giving managers greater visibility into manufacturing performance. The solutions must help provide security, which will facilitate regulatory compliance.
Microsoft and partner solutions
Microsoft provides the application platform and core infrastructure to enable real-time manufacturing visibility. By partnering with industry-leading solution providers, Microsoft enables life sciences manufacturers to collect, manage, and share the right information with the right people.
These solutions can harmonize IT architectures in the plants around the globe and optimize infrastructure, helping life sciences companies to overcome geography and disparate factory systems to deliver key information in an accessible, user-friendly way. These intuitive solutions help provide a secure environment for enhanced collaboration among departments and factories.
Solutions built on the Microsoft platform offer built-in compliance features that streamline the collection of data needed to meet regulatory standards. This infrastructure can also improve the ability of plant managers to access historical production information and refine the process to enhance efficiency.
Using these solutions, managers can obtain a complete, real-time view of manufacturing operations. They gain the ability to drill down into the details at any factory and to quickly spot and solve problems.
Faster response
Microsoft technology delivers easy-to-use solutions that can help pharmaceutical manufacturers respond to changing conditions and improve regulatory compliance.
These solutions help provide security, are easy to validate, and seamlessly integrate with existing systems to create powerful, flexible workflows. They foster collaboration across the manufacturing process -- among plants, suppliers, and wholesalers and distributors -- promoting better factory utilization, customer satisfaction, and inventory control. And they are accessible from any location through a Web browser and a secure network connection.
Equipped with real-time information, managers can detect potential problems as they emerge. Because all information related to production is collected and stored in a central database, life sciences companies can investigate and solve problems faster.
Microsoft-based solutions improve productivity, facilitate compliance, and sharpen decision making. Microsoft can help you control manufacturing costs, which benefits your business.
Accelerate production
Empower people to visualize manufacturing operations in real time.
Gather, integrate, and present real-time manufacturing data from disparate systems and multiple plants.
Analyze operations performance with the capability of drilling down into the details for greater insight.
Facilitate collaboration in real time across geographic boundaries, between different internal business functions, and with outside customers and suppliers.
Control manufacturing costs.
Help speed drugs to patients, improving company performance and worldwide health.
Focused on efficiency
Solutions built on the Microsoft platform can help provide secure access to important data across the product life cycle -- from early-stage discovery, clinical trials, and FDA submission to manufacturing and sales. With these easy-to-use solutions, life sciences manufacturers can efficiently collect, share, and store information from disparate sources in an accessible, intuitive format. By aggregating information across business functions and manufacturing sites, our collaborative solutions improve decision making -- and help control manufacturing costs.
