- Yasmine Peters, Director Manufacturing & Supply Chain, NNIT.
- Olaf Wohlfeil, Senior Consultant Manufacturing & Supply Chain, NNIT.
A global leader in industrial automation, Rockwell Automation provides several mature solutions for life sciences manufacturing and supply chain. Rockwell’s MES system, PharmaSuite®, integrates easily with the rest of Rockwell automation portfolio and contains predefined building blocks for recipe design.
With a rich history and expertise in automation, Rockwell delivers cutting-edge technologies and services across various industries, helping companies to optimize and automate their operations. Rockwell’s MES solution for the Life Sciences industry, FactoryTalk®PharmaSuite®, is a robust MES with mature functionality.
The standard version of PharmaSuite® is pre-validated for GxP operations and provides role-based optimization for all stages of pharmaceutical manufacturing and supply chain management, including designing recipes and workflows, documentation and review by exception functionality. Specialized clients are available for different user roles, for example an execution client for the production floor and an Extended Warehouse Management module (EWM) that integrates with ERP to show the status of the current batch and automate stock movement in your warehouse.
In addition, PharmaSuite® contains a big library of phase building blocks for recipe design. These are designed for various relevant use cases of the industry and can be configured with different parameters. This can be a great time-saver, provided your recipe designers have the proper training and experience.
“Recipe design can be a very time-consuming task and therefore it is a great benefit to have people experienced with using the system. At NNIT, we have assisted multiple clients with this task,” says Yasmine Peters Director M&SC at NNIT.
NNIT’s experience with Rockwell Automation
Rockwell and NNIT have a long professional relationship, with multiple share projects since 2018. This includes MES rollouts at different sites at all stages of the life cycle, from the research stage to complete production processes. Throughout these projects, NNIT has always worked closely with both Rockwell and the client to find a suitable balance between harmonized and specialized processes.
“The introduction or update of an MES system is usually intended to reduce development and maintenance effort by process harmonization. But on the other hand, a portfolio of different products, the surrounding conditions of the site and the regulations applied may require a variety of very specific production processes. Finding the right balance requires both deep domain knowledge of pharma manufacturing and technical expertise with Rockwell’s PharmaSuite®,” says Olaf Wohlfeil.
Selected references:
- European Life Sciences Client – Multi-site MES migration
NNIT assisted this client with transferring existing preference from a legacy MES system to PharmaSuite®. Over a total of 20-25 projects involving multiple sites and divisions of the client organization, each with separate needs and situations, NNIT assisted with numerous different tasks, including transferring existing processes, recipe design, verification and validation, documentation and change management. After the successful launch of PharmaSuite® at each site, NNIT provided support during Go -Live and Hyper-Care phase to address any issues that appeared.
- European Life Sciences Client – Greenfield MES implementation
In connection with the construction of a new manufacturing facility for both solid and liquid production, NNIT assisted this client with MES implementation. NNIT’s team spent significant time on-site to review the surroundings and prepare the MES.
