beyond operational excellence through digital...
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© 2016 Iyno Advisors www.iyno.com
Sustainable Health for
Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing
Beyond Operational Excellence
through Digital Continuity
by Julie Fraser and Amy Rowell
A holistic approach is crucial for the well-being
of patients and companies
Modernizing manufacturing and IT systems are paths industry leaders and regulators believe can result in safe,
affordable, and efficacious drugs, but small improvements may not be enough. Biopharmaceutical companies
are facing multiple challenges including increasing development costs, shifting outcomes-based economic
models, and ever evolving global compliance needs. To combat these challenges, companies are required to
completely realign their offerings, processes, supply chains, and business structures to facilitate innovation,
agility and sustainable high quality.
By better understanding the manufacturing process, a pharmaceutical manufacturer can transform its business
and better manage these conflicting challenges. This knowledge allows a company to achieve faster, more
successful new product ramp-ups, more efficient technology transfer, improved plant performance, and more
business breakthroughs. It can also more readily identify the best manufacturing processes and strategies for
meeting the needs of customers in specific geographies or markets.
To enable this, industry leaders and regulators envision the use of holistic knowledge management systems to
better support innovation efforts and deliver assured compliance. This enables a company to leverage
modeling, simulation and process monitoring tools within a common platform to facilitate performance and
process improvements. Mechanisms for effective data collection, sharing,
and analysis are the foundation of streamlining efforts required to meet
development and manufacturing timelines, as well as regulatory
obligations. Since so many people across numerous diverse domains are
involved in the product lifecycle – both internal and external to the
company – it’s critical that a digital continuity strategy be put in place to
enable global collaboration and faster decision-making and to proactively
support regulatory requirements.
The good news is that there are logical ways to start down the path.
Those who have done it are sharing positive results already, and
regulators have taken notice. The message is clear - wellness programs
are paying off, both for patients and for organizations. As with any
wellness program, the key is to take a holistic and transformational
approach.
Streamlined process
development & start-up
Fast submissions and
approvals
High quality and yield
Low process and product
variability
A sustainable supply chain
An accessible, complete
knowledge base
Beyond Operational Excellence with Digital Continuity
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Table of Contents
Industry Challenges .................................................................................................................................. 1
Current Approaches that Fall Short .................................................................................................... 2
Digital Transformation............................................................................................................................. 2
IT for Digital Continuity ........................................................................................................................... 5
IDMP – What and Why? ......................................................................................................................... 7
Pragmatic Ways to Get Started ............................................................................................................ 9
A Sense of Urgency - Planning for the Future ............................................................................... 10
Note: This paper is based on The Holistic Approach to Pharmaceutical Manufacturing: Product Lifecycle Management
Support for High Yield Processes to Make Safe and Effective Drugs © 2011 Cambashi, with revisions and updates by Iyno.
Dassault Systèmes
Dassault Systèmes Life Sciences industry solution experiences powered by the 3DEXPERIENCE platform are about bringing
products to life – connecting innovative virtual designs with patients, physicians, and other research, regulatory, and clinical
communities. From concept to patient, drug manufacturers create and optimize a formulated product, gain regulatory
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companies can create and manage a design, validate it with regulators, and then provide training and treatments to
physicians and patients using a virtual 3D world.
To learn more about our solutions visit www.3ds.com/life-sciences
Beyond Operational Excellence with Digital Continuity
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Industry Challenges
The pharmaceutical industry is on the verge of a new
era – characterized by a preventive and personalized
approach, rather than prescriptive and volume-
driven. In order to address this shift, many
pharmaceutical manufacturers are realizing that they
must reinvent themselves.
These companies face a myriad of external pressures
and challenges on this journey:
a proliferation of ever-changing regulations that
can drive manufacturing costs higher
a new commercial landscape with new regional
markets, new competitors, and a growing demand
for health and wellness “solutions” not just
products
payers focused on treatments with top outcomes
and shifting to outcomes-based pricing
an increase in outsourcing and a rise in the use of
CMOs (contract manufacturing organizations)
first-to-market pressures and the ability to clearly
demonstrate scientific leadership to
maintain that headstart
All of this comes at a time of significant patent
expirations for many blockbuster drugs, and
the need for new R&D models to facilitate the
development of precision medicine for specific
populations.
Together, these forces are driving
manufacturers to make some major changes
to maintain profitability without sacrificing
safety and efficacy for patients. Across the
industry, manufacturers of branded, generic,
and over the counter (OTC) therapies must
shift their business processes to succeed.
Making medicines for smaller and more
specific patient populations is a clear path to
company success with drugs that are targeted
and thus more effective, while delivering on
the same high safety expectations. Despite the
sound business logic, this is not an easy path.
The resulting product proliferation adds significantly
more complexity and cost to business operations.
Moving a multitude of product variants through
development, into and through trial production,
regulatory approval, and full-scale production quickly
and efficiently is an enormous challenge.
Historically, biopharmaceutical companies have not
invested in manufacturing and supporting
information systems as much as they have in R&D
and marketing. This relative neglect of manufacturing
systems has led to a long list of industry problems
and negative results that regulators, shareholders,
and the public all want to change. Figure 1 illustrates
just a few of these, along with causes. Some
production processes suffer as much as 50% waste.
The result is a very high level of effort and cost to
achieve consistently high quality product.
These inefficient production practices are not
acceptable with the cost-sensitive environments of
national health insurance programs and emerging
markets. The move to “go global” and produce
medicines for smaller patient populations will only
compound these problems.
Problem Cause(s)
High production cost for
products
Low yield and efficiency, waste,
time to test, batch switches, etc.
Drug shortages 65% from manufacturing &
quality problems
Lack of improvements
based on new technologies
Fear of changing validated
manufacturing processes
Slowed development and
access for investigational
drugs
Inefficient transfer of new drugs
into manufacturing and uncertain
scale-up
Need for intensive
regulatory oversight
Poor root cause analysis of
manufacturing failures
Shortages data from Modernizing Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing to
Improve Drug Quality, FDA Voice Feb 1, 2016.
Figure 1: Many industry problems are caused in manufacturing,
and biologics further complicate production.
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Current Approaches that Fall Short
Biopharmaceutical manufacturing executives must
recognize where their current approaches fall short
and develop a path to ensure the sustainability of the
company. Representatives from regulators as well as
the International Conference on Harmonisation of
Technical Requirements for Registration of
Biopharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH) have
presented some of these shortcomings in a
systematic way. Briefly, they include:
Quality by test or managing quality through off-line
analysis will increase the cost and time to achieve
high quality, as it allows products that will not pass
final tests to go through the process. The result is
increased cost, cycle time, and risk, as the company
scraps products and requires a second production
run to get acceptable quality product manufactured.
Issue correction without prevention raises the risk
that problems will occur that could have been
avoided. Prevention must be built into the design of
the production process itself instead of corrected
when problems have already affected the process or
product. This is what regulators are demanding with
Quality by Design (QbD). Many biopharmaceutical
makers are not equipped to understand and execute.
Silos of data and knowledge owned by different
departments or disciplines means valuable data is
often not used as context for decisions about the
product and production process. This is true not only
from stage to stage (development to clinical trials to
full production), but also in some cases among the
groups that service production and process
development, such as statistics and multivariate
analysis, spectroscopy, mathematical modelling, and
risk assessment.
An empirical or variable-by-variable approach to
product development results in a costly and slow
process. It is also vulnerable to blind spots because it
cannot account for the interaction between variables
that frequently cause problems in trials and in scaled-
up full production. Even in multi-variate approaches,
the focus on an average rather than the distribution
of outcomes and minimizing variability (i.e.,
minimizing the likelihood of batches that are out of
specification) can limit production success.
Change-resistant validated processes limit the
companies’ interest in pursuing new technologies
and process improvements that would result in higher
quality and yields at lower cost. Regulators are
attempting to shift that with design space allowances
and new technology support.
Understanding these shortcomings of the current
process development approach, regulators and the
ICH have started to promote the adoption of more
tightly integrated, data-driven approaches. Across
the industry, leading biopharmaceutical producers
are beginning to shift their business processes to new
digital approaches that better leverage product and
process knowledge.
Digital Transformation
To address the challenges of complexity and
knowledge management, biopharmaceutical
manufacturers are investing in a digitally-driven
approach to collecting, managing, accessing and
analyzing critical product and process data. By
harmonizing all of these sources of information, it
creates digital continuity across several dimensions:
Across disciplines
Between products and production processes
Among partners and suppliers across the globe
Throughout the lifecycle
From one generation of product to the next
The ultimate goal is to capitalize on the wealth of
data being generated by collecting it in context to
Understand and simplify
“Dassault Systèmes Solutions, including BIOVIA
Discoverant , gave us an improved understanding
of our process monitoring operations and greatly
simplified data aggregation and visualization.”
Scientist, Global 500 Pharmaceuticals Company
Quotes from Survey conducted by TechValidate, May 2014
Beyond Operational Excellence with Digital Continuity
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become actionable knowledge and insight. The
resulting digital transformation aids in reducing risks
and the need for regulatory oversight. Safe,
efficacious products are the natural outcome of such
digital orientation.
Figure 2 shows how the needs during process design,
process scale-up, production operations, and process
improvement stages can all contribute to a
knowledge base. This graphic includes certificate of
pharmaceutical product (CPP), critical quality
attributes (CQA), scale up and continued process
verification (CPV), annual product review (APR) and
product quality review (PQR), identifying and
reducing variability, and scale-up and post-approval
changes to manufacturing equipment (SUPAC). Even
beyond the needs shown here, a common data
storage, retrieval and documentation system can
help a biopharmaceutical enterprise in making good
decisions.
The benefits of such digital continuity serves patients,
payers, physicians, partners and the company. In
particular, by focusing on the “core” of
biopharmaceutical manufacturing – the
manufacturing process - and implementing data-
driven process monitoring tools to facilitate
performance and process improvements – a
biopharmaceutical manufacturer can achieve a
number of key benefits:
lower process variability and costs
improved supply chain predictability
inventory reductions & higher yields
improved traceability
higher quality outsourcing
faster time-to-market
more successful new product introductions
Manufacturers are also able to more readily identify
the best manufacturing processes and strategies for
meeting the needs of customers in specific
geographies or markets.
Figure 2: Challenges during process design, process scale-up and operation, and process
improvement all benefit from sharing common data. It’s even more beneficial if these also share
with R&D, marketing, clinical, and all disciplines.
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Digital continuity also enables proven process
improvement tools like Quality by Design. QbD and
the ICH 10 pharmaceutical quality system (PQS) offer
a product/process lifecycle approach based on
continuous improvement, as illustrated in Figure 3.
Here, a knowledge repository that supports and
encourages data sharing and collaboration can make
quality data accessible to everyone. Ultimately,
biopharmaceutical manufacturers are seeking to
access and leverage all available and relevant data to
improve manufacturing process design, planning,
monitoring, and logistics. These four operational
areas are so closely related they must support each
other to be fully effective, as in Figure 4.
This is where digital continuity can make a difference.
Digital continuity provides visibility and traceability
across the entire process. The focus is on leveraging
and sharing data across applications and disciplines
for greater collaboration, improved quality and
reliability, and more informed decision-making,
enabling biopharmaceutical manufacturers to
transform their business processes, accelerate
innovation and manage the growing complexity of
drug development.
To accelerate discovery, development and
manufacturing, the ability to easily access and
manage relevant data and information is essential.
Here again, digital continuity can play a key role.
As outlined in the International Conference on
Harmonisation paper “Q12: Technical and Regulatory
Based on graphic in article Challenges in Implementing Quality by Design: an Industry Perspective
by Michael Torres in Bioprocess International, June 16, 2015
Figure 3: Digital Continuity supports the Quality by Design (QbD) integrated science and risk-based approach with
continuous improvement for the entire product life cycle, but all aspects of.the Pharmaceutical Quality System (PQS).
ICH Q 10 shows knowledge and quality risk management, which digital continuity delivers, as enablers.
Figure 4: The four operations pillars of process design,
planning, monitoring and logistics can integrate
effectively if they rest on digital continuity.
Digital Continuity to support the Pharmaceutical Quality System (PQS)
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Figure 5. Digital continuity enables companies to gather, store
and analyze multiple disciplines’ data throughout the product
lifecycle into a useful knowledge repository.
Considerations for Biopharmaceutical Product
Lifecycle Management,” the biopharmaceutical
industry can benefit from a platform that creates a
seamless and continuous data flow to facilitate
accelerated approvals.
In addition, digital continuity can provide much-
needed transparency throughout the lifecycle of a
product - from early clinical trials, through
manufacturing, and to full commercialization. This
enables biopharmaceutical manufacturers to identify
potential formulation or sourcing issues to avoid the
risk of a costly product recall. Such transparency also
provides both decision and process traceability
across all variations at both the product and country
level. This, in turn, helps to streamline supply chain
information and to facilitate traceability in the event
of a recall.
Additionally, because digital continuity improves
information sharing across all phases of the
manufacturing process - from planning and
execution to monitoring and logistics - more
informed decision-making at every stage in the
product development and delivery process is
possible (see Figure 5).
This helps to drive operational efficiencies, speed
production, establish a culture of continuous
improvement and enable knowledge-based decision
making across all aspects of product development –
driving ongoing improvements in product safety,
quality, and reliability.
Indeed, coupled with such initiatives as Quality by
Design (QbD), Process Analytical Technology (PAT),
Process Robustness (PR) and Continued Process
Verification (CPV) digital continuity is especially
powerful. For example, sound CPV practices for
ongoing production help establish control limits to
ensure high yield and consistent quality. Feeding
back from CPV to risk assessment and scale-up
activities for similar products in earlier stages of the
lifecycle can improve outcomes for years to come.
Regulators point out these approaches to help
ensure patient safety and lower costs.
But just what exactly does IT need to deliver to
support digital continuity for biopharmaceutical
manufacturers?
IT for Digital Continuity
The vision of digital continuity is to deliver an
integrated, data-driven, knowledge-based platform
approach to manufacturing, and includes
components that support all aspects of the
manufacturing process from concept through
delivery.
In order to achieve digital continuity in
biopharmaceutical manufacturing, a platform
and a set of software applications dedicated
specifically to biopharmaceutical manufacturing
are required. However, this is rarely the case
today.
Figure 6a shows the struggle most companies
encounter when trying to manage multiple,
disparate data sources across the lifecycle. The
various teams often cannot leverage each
other’s work fully. They typically use different
terminology, have different viewpoints, use and
create different data, and leverage independent
information systems. While everyone involved
is theoretically striving toward the same goal,
these information disconnects can lead to a
Beyond Operational Excellence with Digital Continuity
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lack of understanding and incomplete risk analysis.
This is the fundamental issue the Identification of
Medicinal Products (IDMP) is striving to address. (See
sidebar: IDMP – What and Why?) With a standard
approach to terminology, at least it will be clearer
which products and ingredients are the focus. Figure
6b illustrates digital continuity enabled by an
integrated IT backbone. This builds even beyond the
IDMP continuity. At the core are a common
knowledge repository, workflow and predictive
analytics built on a single platform. In addition,
industry-specific software applications can support all
of the disciplines of biopharmaceutical
manufacturing. This IT approach brings together all
relevant information from various sources and
delivers structured processes by which all disciplines
can work together to improve product quality
proactively.
Such applications can aid in the discovery and
analysis of both chemical and biotherapeutic
candidates as well as the optimization of the overall
workflow, including development, manufacturing and
compliance processes. These applications can also be
used to document experiments as well as support the
management and analysis of all scientific and quality
data generated throughout the process.
More specifically, key applications to support a digital
continuity vision in biopharmaceutical manufacturing
include:
Document and data management: At the heart of
any data-driven digital continuity effort is information
management and a global collaboration platform.
Companies need to store and easily access both
database-resident structured data and “unstructured”
data from drawings, documents and other sources.
For biopharmaceutical companies, in particular, data
management applications are used to document and
manage the flow of information, tasks and materials
within and between disciplines - integrating scientists,
instruments, solutions and information.
Figure 6: Siloes and disconnected information systems are common today (6a left); IT for digital continuity (6b right)
enables more effective collaboration, based on collection, storage, analysis, and leverage of critical product and process
data from concept through delivery via common data management, workflow and advanced analytics.
Figure 6b Figure 6a
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IDMP – What and Why?
Identification of Medicinal Products (IDMP)
enables a single product definition across
functions and partners, not only helping
support compliance but also improve business
process and data management efficiency.
IDMP is a set of five standards published by
ISO in 2012 in response to a demand for
international harmonization of the
identification, characterization and exchange
of medicinal products information. IDMP
supports activities related to the development,
registration and lifecycle management of
Medicinal Products.
The standards for IDMP focus on definitions
and common data formats for the following:
medicinal products (ISO 11615),
biopharmaceutical products (ISO 11616),
substances (ISO 11238), units of
biopharmaceutical dose forms, units of
presentation, routes of administration and
packaging (ISO 11239), and units of
measurement (ISO 11240).
“The Implementation of IDMP will be
transformational across all stakeholders adding
value and capabilities unachievable in the past”
“IDMP Industry Perspective”, John Kiser –
Co-Chair, IDMP Task Force Group
Data search & retrieval: Employees must also be able
to access a wide array of technical, statistical and
other types of data to effectively use the broad
knowledge base around each product, process,
partner, and ingredient or material. To arrive at good
business decisions, the system must find correlations
in seemingly unrelated data from inside, outside or
the web, and deliver dashboards or reports, ideally
without user training or schema design and
application coding. For biopharmaceutical
companies, this includes tools for building and
managing consistent, searchable, and shareable
corporate compound registries. This includes sample
management tools to search across a sample’s
lifecycle.
Analytics and intelligence: This includes tools to see
process performance, quality and compliance risk, as
well as improved understanding and control of
process and product variability. Even with relevant
data, meaningful interpretation of the data can be a
challenge. Sophisticated data analysis can help
identify best practices, and relate design intent to
product outcomes and production process data. For
biopharmaceutical manufacturers, in particular, this
involves leveraging IT to understand past issues and
using those as context for where processes are likely
to trend out of the design window, and see the
impact of changes in ingredients or suppliers.
Product data correlations: The foundation for
product development is structured product
parameters and attributes as well as the formulations
that will achieve those outcomes. Digital continuity
for biopharmaceutical companies provides
contextualization and meta-data to use these
consistently. This, in turn, enables a company to
relate risk analysis, statistical analysis, biological and
chemical data to each product, recording the basis
for design decisions made at each step for each
product. For biopharmaceutical manufacturers, this is
part of the discovery & analysis process, which
includes applications to simplify the analysis of
biology data, with capabilities such as: antibody
discovery (e.g. annotation, alignment, clustering, and
activity data correlation) and single cell validation and
cell growth detection.
Regulatory, quality, and compliance: It is essential to
have a proven validation-ready solution for
managing data, content and processes for quality
assurance and regulatory compliance. In this area,
leading applications include capabilities for managing
regulatory submissions, document and content
management including compliance to the new IDMP
format, non-conformance and CAPA management,
change control, complaints, audits, policy and
procedure management, corporate ethics and
compliance, reporting and dashboarding, etc. (See
Figure 7, which compares strategies that support
minimal requirements for ICH Q8, extended QbD and
digital continuity.)
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Supporting Biopharmaceutical Development
According to ICH Q8 Guidelines
Leveraging Digital Continuity to
Transform Biopharmaceutical
Development Health Minimal
Requirements Enhanced, QbD
Fixed manufacturing
process
Manufacturing process
adjustable within the
design space
Structured change management based
on specifications and analysis
Focus on
reproducibility
Focus on control strategy
and robustness of the
process
Virtual manufacturing with simulation of
the process and product outcomes
Off-line analysis PAT tools used for feed
forward and feedback
process control
Process design creates control
parameters, and data management
handles data from process control
Quality assured by
testing
Risk based control
strategy (real-time
release)
Risk management analysis data stored
and in context and accessible
Empirical
development
Systematic approach to
development
System support for development process
using scientific & empirical data
One variable at a time Multivariate experiment
Multiple variable analysis to minimize out
of specification, not average, results
Reactive lifecycle
management
Preventive lifecycle
management (and
continual improvement)
Multi-disciplinary data and collaboration
from earliest product/process concept
Figure 7: While ICH Q8 will accept the “minimal” requirements, it pushes for the QbD approach, which
digital continuity enables and extends, as it does other regulator-suggested approaches.
Product lifecycle management: Manufacturers need a
well-defined system in place to manage all phases of
product and process development, testing, and
production in an interconnected manner across the
end-to-end product lifecycle. Digital continuity supports
projects, processes, and change procedures with a
structured workflow and complete traceable record.
For biopharmaceutical companies, in particular, it is
essential to have a high performance system to
streamline the capture, analysis and reporting of
scientific information, registration and screening. This
helps to facilitate collaboration, accelerate decisions
and improve bioprocess efficiency. It is also
important to include support for planning and
execution of experiments, data analysis for queries
and visualization, configurable report templates,
capturing of sample pedigree, and data mining and
knowledge generation across the lifecycle. It also
must support the four pillars of biopharmaceutical
operations to
improve
manufacturing
process design,
planning,
monitoring, and
logistics (Figure 4).
Process Planning:
A graphical
scientific workflow
authoring tool with
a large library of
components to
easily build scientific
processes enables
manufacturers to
aggregate and gain
access to data
previously locked in
silos. Capabilities
also include the
ability to automate
the scientific data
analysis process
and rapidly explore,
visualize and report
results.
Process Monitoring: For optimal speed and
consistency, companies will capture product and
process data in-line to give a real-time view of the
manufacturing process. IT systems in production can
enforce procedures and trigger required sign-offs by
operators, supervisors, and inspectors. This can
clearly result in higher yields and more consistent
compliance to SOPs and regulatory requirements.
Supply chain management and logistics: As
ingredients are a critical foundation for product
efficacy, companies must also support sourcing,
supplier performance monitoring, and deliver digital
continuity to the supply network, including CMOs
(contract manufacturing organization). As drug
sponsors expand their use of CMOs, strong and clear
communication and collaboration is critical. Digital
continuity can provide both the access and security
required for these relationships to work effectively.
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This new approach starts with
improving process
specifications to better ensure
product critical quality
attribute (CQA) outcomes
and continues through to
developing ongoing
operating requirements and
best practices. This includes
support for the information
management needs of ICH
Q8 Biopharmaceutical
Development, Q9 Quality Risk
Management, Q10 Quality
System, Q11 Development
and Manufacture of Drug
Substances and Q12 on
Biopharmaceutical Product
Lifecycle Management. Figure 8 shows the scope of
these guidelines. Such an IT system will also support
the specific needs of regulators in various markets
even beyond the EU, U.S. and Japan.
Regulators are also suggesting that using a QbD style
design space allows post approval process changes
within that envelope. An exciting, longer-term aspect
is that a digital continuity approach makes it much
easier to build results of analysis back into current
and future product and process development cycles
and tech transfer activities, as envisioned in ICH Q12.
Leveraging a common platform to support digital
continuity, biopharmaceutical manufacturers can
deploy an integrated process across the lifecycle of
the product. The comprehensive and holistic
approach required for digital continuity supports
collaboration, traceability both inside and outside of
the organization, and comprehensive understanding
of the science, processes, and product outcomes. This
will connect the teams that are ultimately responsible
for developing products, improving the manufacturing
process and the safety and quality of products.
The digital continuity platform does all of the things
mentioned above. It provides biopharmaceutical
manufacturers with the tools and methodologies
required to support a next-generation
biopharmaceutical manufacturing that reaches
beyond Operational Excellence.
Pragmatic Ways to Get Started
With digital continuity providing strategic competitive
advantages, leading biopharmaceutical
manufacturers are beginning to take notice – and
take action. Digital continuity is a large approach for
a big vision. To reap the benefits, most companies
will require new strategies, mindsets, and information
flows. This usually requires a champion with executive
level support across different domains to effect the
required changes in people, processes and
technology. What follows are some basic concepts to
help managers get each of these areas started on the
journey.
What is working
“Dassault Systèmes Solutions, including BIOVIA
Discoverant has allowed us to implement a sustainable
process monitoring plan and improve our
understanding of our manufacturing processes.”
-Systems Analyst,
Large Enterprise Pharmaceutical Company
Quotes from Survey conducted by TechValidate, May 2014
Figure 8: The ICH Guidelines cover various portions of the lifecycle, with
ICH Q12 being broad across the entire lifecycle of products.
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Participate in training, education or workshops to get
your team up to speed. Public sessions relating to
regulatory guidance, operational excellence, and
some of the software to support digital continuity are
available. If only a few of your team or certain
disciplines have attended these sessions, we
recommend enrolling entire cross-disciplinary teams
in overview sessions. As teams begin to share
knowledge, they will begin to establish common
terminology and expectations.
Involve cross-disciplinary teams in designing new
processes that support a more integrated approach.
This common approach should focus on creating a
knowledge inventory, defining CQAs, reducing
variability in ingredients or in processes, formulation
scale-up, improving CPV, or simply opening lines of
communication between disciplines at critical points
in each group’s process. One typical challenging
point is tech transfer from design into production;
others may be from sponsor to CMO.
Technology that is relevant across the product
lifecycle can enable both process change and
education. It’s important to have the total digital
transformation roadmap in mind, but some
companies will start small and build out. In any case,
GMP decisions must be validation-ready. Possible
options include:
Leverage a system that supports effective
production process design with simulation and
verification of results for each product and variant
to be produced on that line.
Implement a system that helps find quantitative
and qualitative data in multiple electronic sources
quickly and efficiently to foster early collaboration
between product development and
manufacturing experts internally and externally.
Use software to deliver the data and analysis
needed to characterize and optimize the
manufacturing process. Analysis of manufacturing
operations can also identify best practices.
Use a platform approach to enforce processes,
make data more coherent and available, and
automate according to 21 CFR part 11.
A Sense of Urgency - Planning for the Future
Every company in the biopharmaceutical industry is
under increasing pressure from regulators, payers
and patients and exposed to a rapidly changing
environment. New opportunities are emerging to
serve worldwide markets and, in some cases, with
therapies targeted to smaller populations offering
improved safety and efficacy. With the resulting
complexity, biopharmaceutical companies must
develop a cross-discipline lifecycle knowledge-base
with instant information access.
Organizations are expected to deliver quality and
performance beyond what operational excellence
offers. Data-driven development and production
capabilities are required for them to reap the profits
and outcomes, handling products in ways that
regulators in each market will accept, and to satisfy
the needs of a new patient-centric market.
Other industries with human safety focus and varying
global regulations such as food, aerospace, defense,
automotive, and cosmetics have proven the value of
a digital continuity approach. Many have been able
to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and adhere to
very high quality and safety standards.
The biopharmaceutical industry is on the brink of a
new era. Outdated information management
systems that are manual or disjointed can no longer
keep up with the complexity and business pressures.
Transformation is required. Leaders are turning to
digital continuity as a more tightly integrated,
information-rich approach based on product and
process knowledge. Moving beyond operational
excellence to digital continuity will leave companies in
a better position to sustain their health and that of
their patients. At the current rate of change, this will
be a critical step for company wellness.
Iyno Advisors
Iyno Advisors combines experience, intuition, intellect, and research to focus on how manufacturing and
production companies and their network of partners can best benefit from software applications and services. www.iyno.com +1 508.362.3480