French Pharma Giant Sanofi Adopting Robotics And Analytics To Get Maximum Production Output

Publish Date : 2017-10-27

French pharma giant Sanofi has put over billions of dollars and past five years to build digital production plants that utilize analytics and robots since it drives its working into a modern world. 

For instance, its biologics facility in both Geel, Belgium, and, Framingham, Massachusetts utilize autonomous mobile robots for displacing and shifting equipment as well as ingredients and “cobots,” i.e., collaborative robots, which will work alongside humans for few processes.

Although robotics has been adopted into pharma manufacturing facilities for a few years now, the French drug manufacturer has created the evolution to alleged digital plants a production priority, funding the evolution with around USD 5.51 billion which it has invested to construct out its manufacturing capacities in the past five years.

That involves the USD 700 million a year; it’s expenditure on biologics manufacturing over 2020. It witnesses the innovative approach as crucial to fulfill the demand for drugs and to manufacture harmless drugs economically as biologics structure the rising part of drug range.

Philippe Luscan, executive VP of global industrial affairs said that he observe huge scope for utilizing simulations and digital models to renovate how they operate, plan and design the plants from the idea through to rendering products to patients.

For plant situated in Geel, Belgium, the French pharma giant has set up sensors that evaluate over 5,000 parameters down the production process and produce around 1 billion data points in each single production cycle. Those can be examined to rapidly detect and rectify the issues to maintain yields high and to permit for prognostic maintenance on machinery.

In Framingham plant, where all procedures are paperless, it utilizes flexible plant design so that a lot of the similar equipment can be utilized to manufacture a range of products.

Sanofi’s each supermodern facilities have a 3D computer replica of the existent plant, referred as a “digital twin,” that supervises all of the records and supplies it to facility managers with a concurrent view that permits them to make alterations as required.

A few of this design derived by Sanofi's in-house experts, however, they are also associating with startups in fields such as operational analytics artificial intelligence, and drone technology. iObeya is one of those; it was major in catering digital visual management equipment.

This type of revolution cannot function without the employees that are fully aware of the new processes, and consequently, in the past three years, over 1,100 employees have passed through the Sanofi production System to penetrate them with a digital capability and mindset.

The modifications for employees involve having robots engaged in few of the more recurring manual processes once executed by workers, whilst operations staff switches their concentration to utilizing computer modeling and analytics to develop control and output by supervising process execution concurrently.

Whilst a major alteration for workers, a Sanofi spokesperson said that the industry made a prior shift in which workers had acquired new processes and science to manufacture drugs and it is similar to their shift from chemistry to biologics.