- Beate Krüger, Director for Business Development Manufacturing & Supply Chain, NNIT.
- Nils Jonescheit, Managing Consultant, Manufacturing & Supply Chain, NNIT.
Despite the rapid digital transformation of the life sciences industry, numerous processes are still handled with paper or spreadsheets. Custom apps designed on low-code platforms like Tulip, can provide a quick, agile, and compliant solution to fill the digital gaps.
Considering the substantial efforts towards digitalization, there is still a surprising amount of paper involved in the day-to-day manufacturing of drugs and medical devices.
In many pharmaceutical companies and CDMOs, comprehensive digital platforms like MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems), LIMS (Laboratory Information Management Systems), QMS (Quality Management Systems) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) now play a major role in manufacturing, logistics and quality management. Nevertheless, the reliance on paper-based processes remains a stubborn obstacle.
According to Nils Jonescheit, Managing Consultant, Manufacturing & Supply Chain at NNIT, paper is used for numerous tasks that are cumbersome and expensive to solve with the big platforms and systems, e.g. cleaning instructions, logbooks or equipment tracking, to name just a few of the typical painpoints.
In any pharma organization, you can identify hundreds or even thousands of processes that were deemed either too complex or not important enough to include in the MES, LIMS or ERP configuration. It happens much more often than you would think. But when you rely on paper or spreadsheets, harmonization of such processes across the organization as well as digital data collection remains a distant target. You cannot easily share it with the rest of the organization, use it for automation, or access it for analytics and improvement without manually transferring it, says Nils Jonescheit.
Low-code allows teams to quickly digitize their processes
The answer to this dilemma is to replace the paper with low-code applications, which can be designed to address specific needs without the rigidity and complexity of design of larger systems. This can be done via platforms such as Tulip, which provide easy-to-use app designing tools.
Low-code apps built on Tulip can seamlessly integrate into existing IT landscapes, boosting productivity and bridging gaps left by MES and other systems. If you just want to digitize a simple process without the time and complexity needed to adjust a larger system, this is where low-code shines, says Nils Jonescheit.
As the name implies, low-code requires just some limited knowledge of coding and similar IT skills, which means that process specialists, LEAN experts and other people on the floor can be directly involved in building the ideal digital tools they need to perform their work. Tulip also supports an extensive ecosystem of partners like NNIT, that have the experience and industry insights to provide best-practice-based, process-oriented solutions and templates for life sciences customers.
As a typical example, Nils Jonescheit mentions a checklist used for cleaning rooms and preparing manufacturing equipment between batches.
This type of list usually stays on paper, even though ensuring proper cleaning is critical for operational compliance and safety. The main reason: often the cleaning is performed by external partners with frequently changing personnel that don’t have access to the MES platform functions. By converting the checklist to a simple & safe low-code application, the execution result can be fed into the MES and used to verify and document that the equipment has been cleaned before starting a new batch.
A digital checklist also enables the use of other types of technology, such as RFID chips to guide equipment management and cleaning processes.
