Activity
  • Increasing Life Sciences Manufacturing Capacity

    Supply chain disruptions have forced manufacturers and producers across the globe to reexamine how they source raw materials, inventory, produce, and disseminate what they produce. In an Australasian BioTechnology article, Facilities for a Strong Future , Emerson’s Michalle Adkins and Makarand Mujumdar share how pharmaceutical and biotech manufacturers can improve local capacity to meet the needs of the regions in which…
  • Four Pillars for Life Sciences Line and Facility Efficiency

    The overall Line and Facility effectiveness is becoming an increasing area of focus for Life Sciences manufacturers, where they are continually striving to gain the most from all of the available assets and materials. Challenges such as resource bottlenecks, impacts of variability, lack of visibility to production floor schedule changes, and off-line testing limit line and facility efficiencies are all factors that can…
  • Improving Equipment Reliability for Life Sciences Manufacturers

    Reliability of assets used in the manufacturing process is paramount for safe, efficient and effective operations. Unplanned asset failures, improper asset performance, poor maintenance planning, and untimely follow-through can cause shutdowns, under-utilized production equipment, deviations, or material/product losses. I caught up with Emerson’s Ben Arriola on how this applies to operational integrity for pharmaceutical…
  • Holistic Production Readiness Strategy is Key to Operational Success

    Initiating Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) production operations, whether as part of facility start-up, product changeover, or following a shutdown, requires complex coordination of both logical and physical process controls. Inefficient configuration and qualification practices for automation and information management systems can lead to both start-up delays and productivity losses. A few items among the many to…
  • Single-use pH Sensors in Biopharmaceutical Applications

    As medicines and therapies become more specialized and targeted, the need for single-use measurement technology grows for biopharmaceutical manufacturers. Emerson’s Ben Arriola along with Jinbo Hu teamed up to share more about this trend in a BioProcess International special report, Design and Performance of a New Single-Use pH Sensor with Long Shelf Life and High Stability . In Ben’s article, Introducing the Next-Generation…
  • Single-use pH Sensors in Biopharmaceutical Applications

    As medicines and therapies become more specialized and targeted, the need for single-use measurement technology grows for biopharmaceutical manufacturers. Emerson’s Ben Arriola along with Jinbo Hu teamed up to share more about this trend in a BioProcess International special report, Design and Performance of a New Single-Use pH Sensor with Long Shelf Life and High Stability . In Ben’s article, Introducing the Next-Generation…
  • A More Measured Move to the Pharma Cloud

    There is little doubt that the recent explosion in available cloud technologies has been a boon for manufacturing across a wide array of industries. Pharmaceutical manufacturers are no exception, and organizations are now carefully considering where leveraging cloud technology makes the most sense to improve business and operational success. In his recent article, “Slow Rush to the Cloud” in Pharma Manufacturing, Emerson…
  • Real-time Scheduling and Capacity Analysis Address Manufacturing Challenges

    A friend of mine who works in Life Science manufacturing told me about a cynical wager she and her colleagues made after their 6-person team completed a 5-day marathon production planning and scheduling session. The 6-person cross functional team did everything in good old Excel. “How soon will they have to meet again to re-schedule and rework this excel file?” That happened about 16 months back – in the dark, early…
  • Effective Personnel Drive Operational Integrity

    As consumers of medicinal products of various kinds (vaccines, immunotherapies, tablets, capsules, cell therapies, etc.), we know that although product quality is important, reliable supply is also critical. A reliable supplier of therapeutic goods requires the facilities within its manufacturing supply chain to also be reliable suppliers of their intermediates and products. An important part of being a reliable supplier…
  • Avoid Taking a Successful Reliability Program for Granted by Improving Its Use

    Success must be supported so it can be sustained. As Chris Jensen and H.P. Slater discuss in an article in the July issue of Process Heating , this line of thinking is no less true in predictive maintenance (PdM) than in anything else. Some companies are impressed with the initial savings that PdM programs generate through improved production and lower maintenance costs, but New PdM programs typically identify many…
  • Avoiding Unplanned Downtime in Life Sciences Industry

    For manufacturers in the Life Sciences industry, production challenges often occur in these four areas—production readiness, equipment reliability, personnel effectiveness and facility/line efficiency. In this post, I’ll focus on equipment reliability, and specifically, unplanned downtime. Maintenance Scheduling Click to enlarge Equipment reliability spans several areas—asset performance, line and unit performance…
  • Improve the Flow, then Automate

    Digital technology amplifies process outcomes, both good and bad, by automating standard workflows, completing calculations, and performing repetitive tasks. It provides the ability to capture and analyze process data real-time while leveraging predictive modeling to inform rapid decision making. Once installed and validated, digital technology relentlessly enforces predetermined process standards. It provides valuable…
  • Fast Tracking Adaptable Manufacturing in Life Sciences

    To inoculate people worldwide as soon as vaccines are proven requires the pharmaceutical industry to ramp up quickly to unprecedented volumes of supply. And technology transfer—moving the knowledge about and the ability to produce a vaccine from development to manufacturing—is a primary determinant of how fast it happens. In a presentation at the ACHEMA Pulse virtual conference this year, Emerson’s Alan Johnston shared…
  • Digital Transformation Key to Vaccine Development and Rollout

    The first doses of a Covid-19 vaccine were administered on Dec 14, 2020, about a year after the disease was first detected. Tested, FDA-approved for emergency use, rapidly manufactured and safely delivered at sub-freezing temperatures, this was, by any measure, the fastest pathway to vaccination in human history. One of the latest examples of development from scratch was the mumps vaccine in the 1960s. It took four…
  • Rosemount 1408H Non-Contacting Level Transmitter Receives Red Dot Design Award

    The Red Dot Design Award is an annual design competition that appraises the best products created every year. Expert juries in the areas of product design, communication design, and design concepts, select the winning designs. The Rosemount 1408H Non-Contacting Level Transmitter has received the award for Product Design 2021 and has been acknowledged for its stylish, innovative and patented cooling design, which allows…
  • Improving Logical Changeover Production Readiness in the Life Sciences

    Pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical manufacturers have long felt the pressures of moving products from discovery to delivery as fast as they can—even given the highly regulated industry in which they operate. Technology has continued to advance and provide ways to assist these companies with production readiness. Improper set up and qualification of automation and information management production applications cause…
  • Breakthroughs in Bioprocess Modeling and Control

    Biopharmaceutical manufacturers have done amazing work in getting the COVID-19 vaccines out across the globe. Bioprocessing of these and other medicines is performed in bioreactors which rely on cells to create the intended therapeutic. Emerson’s Greg McMillan , teaming with Christopher Stuart , Rehman Fazeem , Zachary Sample and Timothy Schieffer have updated and revised the second edition of the book, New Directions…
  • Five Things You Can Do, Starting Today, to Improve Your Cybersecurity Defenses

    Recent world events—from the expansion of remote access in response to COVID restrictions to high-profile industrial cyberattacks—have put a renewed focus on cybersecurity. While cybersecurity needs vary from organization to organization, there are common, critical steps every company can follow to improve their cybersecurity posture.   Alexandre Peixoto and Lee Neitzel explore five of these strategies in automation.com…
  • Rapid Engineered Solutions for Complex Fluid Control Applications

    Time to market is critical for most industries and this is true for medical device & analytical instrumentation manufacturers. Suppliers to these manufacturers need to quickly respond to demands for innovative technologies and expertise to help the manufacturers meet their aggressive project schedules. In this 3-minute YouTube video, Rapid Engineered Solutions Customized Analytical & Medical Valve Solutions , Emerson…
  • Precision Miniature Isolation Valves in Clinical Diagnostic Equipment

    We all appreciate the advances in medical technology to detect issues early and help us lead full and healthy lives. For medical diagnostic equipment that require fluid samples, this equipment requires fast, accurate and compact fluid control during diagnostic test runs. In this 5-minute YouTube video, Fluid Control Solutions for Clinical Laboratory Dispensing Applications , Emerson’s Tony Gaglio describes a new product…
  • Emerson Technologies Supporting Fast COVID-19 Vaccine Development and Rollout

    In a Pharmaceutical Processing World article, Emerson’s Ben Arriola and Zach Blum discuss technologies advancing vaccine development. It’s safe to say that there has never been a pharmaceutical effort so huge, fast, and successful as developing multiple vaccines for COVID-19. It is truly global in that countries all over the world are developing their own formulations. Making this possible and practical has depended…
  • Digital Twin Technology for Bioreactor Control and Optimization

    At Texas A&M University’s Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center’s 76 th Instrumentation and Automation Symposium , Emerson’s Greg McMillan presented two topics. I’ll recap his Bioreactor Control and Optimization presentation in today’s post and save his Process Effects on Control for a future post. Greg opened explaining how digital twin technology enables Process Analytical Technology (PAT) for manufacturers in the…
  • Making Medicine Personal with Flexible Automation Solutions

    Personalized medicine manufacturers are rapidly changing their manufacturing platforms to provide a new scale of production. In the Emerson Exchange Virtual Series, life sciences experts held an open Q&A on the trajectory of cell and gene therapies, and how a different approach to automation helps enable a brave new world of therapeutics. Cell and gene therapies disrupt manufacturing Kelsey Hill , Emerson’s life…
  • Single-Use Biopharma Needs Specialized pH Sensing Technology

    Industry is seeing a shift to single-use biopharmaceutical manufacturing methods, prompting a need for new pH measurement approaches to overcome instrumentation challenges. Scientist working with a bioreactor for cell culture Monitoring and historizing the pH of a process media batch, and often using this value for control and automation, is commonly required for biopharma processing operations. Traditional production…
  • Modular Plug and Play, MTP Will Enable More Flexible Life Sciences Manufacturing

    Modular facilities are a key enabler of speed to market in life sciences. As organizations try to bring new therapies to market faster, those therapies require a wide variety of equipment—many of which are new to the process. These new machines must not only work together, but also must integrate seamlessly with existing process equipment and systems to keep production nimble. In the recent Emerson Exchange Virtual…