Industrial Automation Magazine India

Pharma industry benefiting from digital transformation

Published on : Tuesday 30-11--0001

Indian pharma industry is growing rapidly and its demands and dynamics are different in many ways compared to other industries. What is your view in this regard?

The landscape of Indian pharma industry is changing rapidly. It is on track to become one of the leading pharma markets globally. However, in order to sustain this growth, pharma companies are moving in the direction of compliant, connected, energy efficient facilities with comprehensive diagnostics and predictive maintenance. They are demanding these optimisations and enhancements in their machines and lines from their machine builders. This is driving the need for innovations and fuelling the need for smart manufacturing. Automation and robotic technologies are not only helping industry to respond to rising customer demands but also are enhancing the position of Indian pharma industry on global map.

B&R is well known for delivering complete solutions for enabling digital manufacturing. How can pharma Industry benefit from IoT and digital revolution?

Indeed! B&R is globally renowned for offering complete hardware and software solutions coupled with comprehensive service and hard-earned expertise in automating and digitalising machines and factories. One of our notable Industrial IoT solutions offers advantages for both new machinery and equipment (Greenfields) as well as existing legacy systems (brownfield). One potential drawback in pharma industry is rooted in equipment. This industry cannot afford risks of unplanned shutdown and afford to waste an entire batch due to these shutdowns. There could be many reasons for an asset’s failure, like voltage fluctuation, mechanical damage, chemical deterioration, unstable environment conditions, etc. A 24/7 real-time asset monitoring provides an opportunity to the industry to deal with and avoid such unplanned shutdowns.

In addition, pharma industry need to log operations performed by users without the risk of being tampered. With our mapp Technology, we provide a quick and easy ways to implement and customise audit trails. Machine builders thus, obtain various benefits and comply with FDA CFR 21 Part 11 using a controller instead of using a dedicated SCADA system. Machine builders and factory operators benefit from maximum security without altering anything in the control system. With B&R solutions, machine builders achieve accelerated development and reduce investment risk for applications subject to the FDA's Title 21 CFR Part 11 requirements. The ability to retrace actions performed on a machine can also be of great service to its manufacturer in the event of warranty claims.

Our Industrial IoT solution package enables pharma industry to improve lifecycle management, condition-based predictive maintenance, process data acquisition and even long-term archiving.

Even if you cannot rely on your Internet connection, you can always rely on B&R to bring you ample benefits of Industrial IoT.

How does B&R satisfy requirements of its customers, helping them enhance their business productivity?

Advance automation concepts definitely have a huge potential to change day-to-day activities in any pharma facility. The only concern is how quickly these technologies become a reality. Every year, B&R invests heavily in R&D activities and come up with trend setting innovations in order to satisfy market demands. ACOPOStrak is one of the latest innovation from B&R and has been designed and developed to specifically satisfy the need for adaptive, connected manufacturing and extend the economy of mass production down to batches of one. This new technology from B&R features independent shuttles moved by permanent magnets along a long-stator linear motor track with a hygienic design. Product movements can be configured individually, including variable speed and acceleration as well as batch grouping and ungrouping. The drastic increase in processing speed makes your line more productive, flexible and scalable.

Another notable innovation, integrated machine vision plays a major role in achieving and maintaining compliances and stay competent throughout the pharma manufacturing and packaging stages involved on the production floor. Machine vision can be used for inspection of different processes like, code validation, matching, shape identification, QA for filling and capping, liquid filling level, contamination, sealing, labelling, QR code identification, etc., and be a key differentiator for any pharma company. Moreover, this machine vision is integrated in the automation portfolio and companies do not need to invest in an additional controller for inspection. Machine vision leads to productivity through lower operating costs, by cutting costs in inspection processes as well as reduces market rejections.

In the market, there are many machine vision suppliers. What made B&R step into this field?

Machine vision technology is suited for very specific applications in the pharmaceutical industry enhancing productivity in a number of ways. It is playing an increasingly important role in modern manufacturing. However, until today, machine control and machine vision were believed to be two different worlds. Incorporating machine vision into an application was looked at as an extremely complex task. B&R identified this market gap and with our integrated approach to machine vision, we are able to unify the worlds of machine vision and automation into one. B&R vision system provides an unprecedented level of integration, flexibility, eliminating all drawbacks previously associated with vision systems. Our solution joins these two worlds together by seamlessly integrating machine vision into machine automation. A single controller is capable of handling machine tasks, motion, robots, CNC as well as vision all integrated on Ethernet POWERLINK. The same controller is capable of connecting to higher-level systems over OPC UA, MQTT or AMQP enabling IT/OT convergence.

How advantageous is B&R’s vision system in terms of quality effectiveness and efficiency?

Most of us in the field of automation are aware that integration solves major issues. With our vision system seamlessly integrated in our automation portfolio enables extremely precise synchronisation for high-speed image capture and object-specific functions such as bright-field or dark-field illumination are easy to implement. Image triggers and lighting control can be synchronised with the rest of the automation system in hard real time and with sub-microsecond precision. In fact, the integration makes us so fast that we can accomplish things with our standard hardware what would otherwise require highly specialised high-speed cameras. Such features are highly desirable in the pharmaceutical industry and ours being a cost-effective solutions makes it even more appropriate.

Could you give us an example where a B&R camera is used in an application?

Today, our vision systems are highly demanded by machine builders from all market segments owing to the immense benefits on offer. One such use case is from a certain B&R customer from the food and beverage industry, who was so impressed by the performance that they have begun phasing out their obscenely expensive high-speed cameras in favour of our machine vision solution – at a fraction of the cost. The customer was sceptical initially, however, soon they realised that they could ignore all their preconceived notions about what machine vision can and can't do, and simply focus on developing an optimal machine process. That is what happens when you integrate machine vision into the automation system: instead of being a design constraint, it becomes a powerful tool that opens up previously unimaginable possibilities in machine development.