Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1468049
Pharmaceutical Technology TRENDS IN MANUFACTURING 2022 eBOOK 47 One needs to also take into account that all technology, established and new, interacts with other technologies. Hence, siloed innovation ini- tiatives and solutions minimize the speed of roll- ing out and the benefit. As seen in Figure 3, the core business of pharma- ceuticals is at the center of the concept, including its backbone with logistics, sampling, cleaning, and QC laboratories. Thus, introducing robot- ics to achieve an end-to-end automated process means that all these functions or areas, respec- tively, have to be partially or completely rethought. A detailed description of how to approach this achievement is beyond the scope of this article, so we will conclude by talking about the outlook to provide some direction. The next aspect of the concept is that all digital tools are only partially useful if they are not con- nected to other systems. Hence, a solid and easy to extend IT and OT infrastructure is required. Digitalization and lights-out factories (or "touch- less", in the case of being aseptic) still need to be controlled, and this fact opens new opportunities to in-process control strategies (e.g., online mi- crobial monitoring and real-time release). How- ever, all the data generated needs to be processed and used for further improvement. Therefore, a data science and digital systems architecture is just as important. Enablers crucial for any technology utilized in the GxP environment are just as essential to ad- dress, such as safety, verification, process valida- tion, technological standardization, and modular- ization. Without those, the chance of successful introduction is close to zero. The last but no less important factor, which is of ten underestimated in the search for off- the-shelf solutions, is convergent technologies. They are highly signif icant for the successful and, above all, value-added scaling of robots Figure 3. A route to enable robotics as a driver for the factory of the future, with the example of fill/finish and packaging. IT is information technology; OT is operational technology; IoT is Internet of Things; AI is artificial intelligence; ML is machine learning; DL is deep learning. Figure is courtesy of Takeda.