Executing lean concepts in Pharma, Biopharma and Medical Devices is critical to maintain and improve efficiency, quality, regulatory compliance and productivity. With the increasing speed and development of drugs and new devices, manufacturing, quality and labs face potential disruptions from new materials, equipment and manufacturing processes on a continuous basis. In addition, macro trends in life sciences are also increasing the need for industrial transformation and the digitalization of lean.
Trends impacting Life Sciences teams
Life sciences manufactures today are impacted by several trends, particularly in areas such as personalization and increasing product portfolio complexity. Teams in life sciences are under increasing pressure to manage a growing number of products, new classes of combination products along with the need for fast new product introduction without compromising on quality. These challenges often require improvements, modification or adoption of new manufacturing processes. In addition, we continue to witness increasing regulatory constraints and new process quality compliance requirements, for which teams must ensure regulatory and quality compliance. Unfortunately, teams across many companies are limited to managing these trends with disparate, legacy IT solutions in manufacturing operations. These outdated ways of planning and running manufacturing lean programs, quality and stand-up meetings are simply inefficient in keeping up with the demands of modern life sciences manufacturing.
Furthermore, most lean programs today remain disconnected from overall industrial transformation initiatives (which can offer a remedy), and often continue old approaches while the rest of business invests in new PLM, LMS, MES or APS and Supply Chain Planning systems. Likewise, while industrial transformation programs abound in life sciences, lean programs and other continuous improvement programs tend to stick to old methods and technologies—using static whiteboards, spreadsheets and non-collaborative tools. This often results in teams missing out on opportunities to engage and realize the full potential of their manufacturing operations and meet the challenges at hand.
A digital lean approach for Life Sciences manufacturing and operations
Fortunately, there is a better approach to digital lean programs: Dassault Systèmes DELMIA 3DLean. 3DLean addresses the question, “What if you could harness the collective intelligence of your organization to reveal and improve operations?” and provides a digital collaborative solution to achieve this.
3DLean is a modern approach to achieve effective collaboration and is a quick win for industrial transformation, enabling you to jumpstart the transformation journey across your enterprise. Powered by the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, 3DLean is cloud based, collaborative and interactive, guiding teams to reveal rich information in the digital form required for issue identification and resolution. It allows for remote workers and extended team members to participate and promote a lean culture, with the ability to track and alert team members of actions required, in real time, to improve and maintain operational effectiveness, safety, regulatory compliance and efficiency.
Several of our customers and industry leaders who have embarked on transforming their lean, continuous improvement, and quality programs by these means, have found several tangible benefits. This includes simplified live team interactions regardless of where or how people work, which allows teams to capitalize lean productivity gains every meeting, every day across departments. Teams across R&D, quality, labs and manufacturing are empowered to work autonomously and communicate in engaging and natural ways. Thanks to 3DLean, they gain the ability to transform data, team knowledge and know-how into meaningful evidence for all as well as visually interact with rich 3D content and data. Ultimately, companies who have successfully implemented this collaborative solution are able to discover the art of the possible using lean principles and making ‘lean thinking’ a part of the process, business and company culture.
For more information and discover how to jumpstart industrial transformation in Life Sciences manufacturing, read our latest eBook.
