The pharmaceutical industry is a high-stakes industry that operates in a highly competitive environment. Here, precision, compliance and efficiency play an important role that cannot be compromised and overlooked. With growing demand for medications on a global scale, it’s essential for a pharma company to keep its production lines completely operational, devoid of any disruptions. In other words, maintaining assets, whether production machinery or laboratory instruments in good condition is the hallmark of efficiency. Even a slight disruption can cost millions of dollars, impacting productivity and the brand image of an organization. This is why Asset Management for Pharma is critical to ensure seamless operations and regulatory compliance.
While manual methods to monitor and maintain assets no longer work and have proved inefficient, it’s time to adopt the right technology, preferably mobile asset management solutions, emerging as game-changers in the current operational and competitive climate. A mobile maintenance solution is highly beneficial for technicians and maintenance managers alike that helps in optimizing operations, minimizing downtime and ensuring regulatory compliances.
In this blog, we will briefly understand the current pharma industry landscape, the significance of proactive asset management, and how a good mobile maintenance solution can be the best bet in ensuring operational excellence through effective Asset Management for Pharma.
The pharmaceutical industry involves intricate manufacturing processes that are highly complex, requiring a variety of assets. Hence, there lies a greater responsibility for the organization to properly maintain and manage its assets. Some of the core assets include heavy machinery (required for drug production), testing equipment, storage units, and distribution vehicles.
All these assets have a major role in safeguarding the product quality, safety and timely delivery. However, maintaining these assets regularly is quite a challenge, considering the stringent compliance requirements. Added to that are the high maintenance costs for ensuring that these assets run uninterrupted. With surprise disruptions and downtimes, it can lead to poor operational efficiency, considerable financial strain, and above all risking the patients’ health. This highlights the importance of robust Asset Management for Pharma to mitigate such risks.
Conventional asset management practices lack the requisite direction to properly address the changing requirements of pharmaceutical manufacturing. Organizations have traditionally relied on reactive maintenance strategies – fixing the problem only when the equipment is down or has completely stopped working. This will lead to costly downtime and missed production batches. On the contrary, being over cautious about maintenance – cultivating a practice of scheduling maintenance beforehand, irrespective of the health of the machinery leads to excessive financial burden and wasted resources.
It is in this context; a reliable and an effective maintenance strategy is gaining ground – a proactive approach that relies more on data, rather than guesswork or arbitrary assessment. With data-based maintenance approach, it helps predict and mitigate issues before they snowball into major disruptions. This type of maintenance is also referred to as predictive maintenance that uses machine learning algorithms and data analytics to easily probe potential failures, based on the historical data. Such strategies are integral to modern Asset Management for Pharma.
A mobile maintenance solution like that offered by Propel Apps offers real-time visibility into asset efficiency and much more, so you derive the right insights for timely intervention and scheduling your maintenance.
Let’s understand how this solution can play a major role in optimizing your asset performance:
Leveraging GPS and RFID technologies, Propel Apps’ mobile maintenance solution lets you track the location of your assets, status and other data in real-time. Irrespective of any asset that it tracks – your laboratory instruments or checking whether your storage units maintain the permissible temperature, you can gain complete control, anytime, anywhere. This capability is a cornerstone of effective Asset Management for Pharma.
The beauty of this solution is it generates automatic alerts for calibration and maintenance schedules, thereby letting you easily fix potential issues before they escalate into severe problems. This way, you reduce downtime and facilitate uninterrupted production cycles.
Unlike other industries, regulatory compliance is perceived seriously and is critical. Using this solution, you can easily record data and maintain detailed records of various parameters such as usage of assets, maintenance history, and environmental regulations. This way, you are rest assured of meeting all the regulatory requirements on a timely basis.
With a mobile solution that is innovative, and data driven, you can easily probe anomalies in equipment, improve resource allocations and take the right decision with respect to future investments.
When you completely cut intuition and guess work and rely only on data, you foster a better maintenance culture across your organization. That’s exactly what the Propel Apps solution is designed to achieve! When you gain real-time insights into your equipment health using this solution, you minimize waste, optimize asset utilization and prevent trivial repairs and replacements. This way, you tend to minimize maintenance costs that ultimately leads to cost savings in the long run. Such outcomes are the direct benefits of adopting advanced Asset Management for Pharma technologies.
To know how Propel Apps’ mobile maintenance solution can take the lead in fostering a good asset maintenance culture in your pharma industry, schedule a free demo with us.
The future of asset management in the pharma industry is bright, promising and fruitful. The future is driven by the rapid adoption of the latest technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and the Internet of Things (IoT). Let’s briefly review some of the key trends that redefine the pharma industry in the coming years:
These trends positively impact the overall maintenance climate of a pharma organization, apart from complying with its environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals, and will further advance Asset Management for Pharma practices.
Pharma industry is a high-stakes industry where reliability and trust make a huge difference – life saving drugs need to reach customers on time. This makes asset management all the more crucial – even a slight disruption in production equipment or testing apparatus can severely cost billions of dollars and even risk the patient’s lives. While manual processes no longer work as desired, it’s the mobile maintenance solutions that are the game-changers in enforcing good asset management practices. A mobile maintenance solution fosters greater transparency in asset management – you know the type of assets, where they are located, and above all you also get real-time insights about your asset health. This is the essence of effective Asset Management for Pharma.
These real-time, data-driven insights are the key to deciding when and what type of maintenance is required for your equipment, cutting down unnecessary costs and excessive resource utilization. With the evolution of the pharma industry, keeping abreast with the latest trends and technologies is the key to success in the future economy, driven by patient safety, compliance, and operational efficiency through advanced Asset Management for Pharma.
