Offensive on Pharma Production 4.0

Phar­ma pro­duc­tion is about to take its next major step for­ward. Today dig­i­tal tools already enable man­u­fac­tur­ers to reduce down­time, improve the pro­duc­tiv­i­ty of their machines and increase their flex­i­bil­i­ty. The next phase of this devel­op­ment involves the intel­li­gent net­work­ing of machines, data and knowl­edge. Two fac­tors are deci­sive here: open tech­ni­cal sys­tems and the abil­i­ty of all actors to coop­er­ate with one anoth­er. Excel­lence Unit­ed is now tak­ing the offen­sive on Phar­ma Pro­duc­tion 4.0 with solu­tions that aim to meet these requirements.
Since the alliance was found­ed in 2011, the Excel­lence Unit­ed part­ners have advanced var­i­ous joint projects. Among oth­er things, this involves close coop­er­a­tion in busi­ness oper­a­tions with ser­vice cen­ters all over the world and a joint­ly man­aged Ser­vice Por­tal. The next step now is the net­work­ing of com­po­nents, machines and lines. At Achema 2018, Excel­lence Unit­ed showed ful­ly inte­grat­ed, dig­i­tized best-in-class solu­tions under the mot­to “Dis­cov­er Dig­i­tal Excel­lence”. At their core is the Excel­lence Unit­ed IoT Hub, a mod­ern plat­form for the soft­ware devel­op­ment and sys­tem inte­gra­tion of entire phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal pro­duc­tion lines. The machin­ery cov­ers all the process steps from ini­tial weigh­ing to pack­ag­ing. The pro­duc­tion line is also con­nect­ed through the IoT Hub. The trade fair pre­sen­ta­tion is round­ed off by dig­i­tal solu­tions for life cycle man­age­ment as well as aug­ment­ed and vir­tu­al real­i­ty appli­ca­tions for main­te­nance and training.

Excellence United IoT-Hub

The Excel­lence Unit­ed IoT Hub is an open and mod­u­lar plat­form for soft­ware devel­op­ment and sys­tem inte­gra­tion. The IoT Hub enables users to net­work togeth­er not only machines from the Excel­lence Unit­ed part­ners, but also those of third-par­ty man­u­fac­tur­ers. The IoT Hub is con­ceived as a non-hier­ar­chi­cal mid­dle lay­er and uses stan­dard­ized inter­faces, includ­ing OPC UA, which is seen in the indus­try as the future stan­dard data com­mu­ni­ca­tion pro­to­col. In prac­tice, this means that sen­sors, machines, periph­er­als and pro­grams can be con­nect­ed direct­ly to the plat­form inde­pen­dent­ly of the sys­tem lev­el. Instead of hav­ing to devel­op an inter­face with a high­er-lev­el sys­tem (e.g. MES, ERP) for every indi­vid­ual machine, one inter­face with the IoT Hub is suf­fi­cient to net­work the sys­tems and link them to busi­ness process­es. Data trans­fer between machines and with the end user takes place over secure con­nec­tions – either on the spot with the cus­tomer or using the infra­struc­ture of the Excel­lent Unit­ed Ser­vice Por­tal. Machine net­works that can­not be com­plete­ly secured are decou­pled from appli­ca­tions. This means that it is impos­si­ble to gain access to all the data through the machine inter­faces. The IoT Hub is scal­able as result of its open archi­tec­ture and mod­u­lar struc­ture. It can not only be used effi­cient­ly on both indi­vid­ual machines and larg­er sys­tems, but also expand­ed with new inter­faces and appli­ca­tions that have been devel­oped inde­pen­dent­ly or joint­ly with customers.

Complete line for continuous tablet production

Anoth­er high­light of Excel­lence United’s Achema pre­sen­ta­tion was the pre­miere of a com­plete, ful­ly inte­grat­ed line for con­tin­u­ous tablet pro­duc­tion. The pro­duc­tion line cov­ers all process steps from ini­tial weigh­ing to mix­ing, gran­u­lat­ing, dry­ing, tablet­ing, dedust­ing and coat­ing to pack­ag­ing in blis­ters and car­tons. The Excel­lence Unit­ed part­ners have bro­ken entire­ly new ground in the con­tin­u­ous man­u­fac­tur­ing of sol­id dose prod­ucts with this solu­tion. Its devel­op­ment has met tech­no­log­i­cal require­ments that no oth­er man­u­fac­tur­er has yet been able to sat­is­fy. These also include the com­plete dig­i­tal trace­abil­i­ty of all batch­es as well as the pre­cise mon­i­tor­ing of the active ingre­di­ent con­cen­tra­tion in every tablet with the simul­ta­ne­ous doc­u­men­ta­tion of all process para­me­ters in the pro­duc­tion log.