Pharma 4.0 - Impact Of IIOT In Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

With the growing number of medical ailments across the globe, the pharmaceutical industry will undoubtedly become more important than ever in the near future. There is a paradigm shift from the mass production of drugs to offering more customized and specialized drugs to a smaller group of patients and this is greatly expected to improve the effectiveness of treatments.

- Frost & Sullivan

The Pharma 4.0 initiative is expected to not only address productivity issues but also provide the industry with smarter tools that can help ensure drug safety. Everyday factory equipment, people, and processes are thus getting increasingly smarter with the advent of digitization.

The introduction of digitization in pharmaceutical manufacturing will also be instrumental in enabling a seamless data exchange across the pharmaceutical supply chain. The connectivity of product, people and process is what constitutes the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Manufacturing will undoubtedly be the biggest beneficiary of IIoT. Thus, industries such as pharma and healthcare will certainly stand a good chance to continue to benefit from IIoT. Analytics enabled data management vis-à-vis traditional paper-centric approaches will come a long way in being crucial enablers for important management decisions. The pharmaceutical industry should consider making investments in IIoT technologies, most of which are already mature in other industries and have proven effective in improving the efficiency of complex manufacturing operations. Leveraging lessons from this should help companies improve their financial and operational performances.