Pfizer
Successful manufacturing operations at F&N Dairies depend on AVEVA solutions.
For over 170 years, Pfizer’s breakthroughs in medicines, vaccines, and therapeutics have improved patients’ lives around the world. While patients receive treatments in a simple form – a simple pill or injection – the process of discovering, developing, and manufacturing a drug is incredibly complex. The process requires not only rigorous research but also exacting process monitoring. Operations data for visibility during the process is critical to Pfizer’s success. However, at Pfizer’s Small Molecule Division in Groton, Connecticut, operations data was siloed and available only within the physical building, which increased manual work for operators.
These data silos also hindered collaboration and created data latency issues. To reach its goal of doubling the innovation success rate while decreasing time to market, Pfizer needed a new data strategy.
Using AVEVA PI System, Pfizer embarked on a journey to digitize the drug discovery process and create a single source of truth for self-service operational insights that are accessible anytime and anywhere.
A democratized data strategy
Pfizer, a longtime AVEVA PI System user with a newly signed Enterprise Agreement (EA), focused its initial digitalization efforts on its portable, continuous, miniature, and modular (PCMM) machine for oral solid doses. Pfizer’s PCMM technology is a first-of-its-kind manufacturing system that accelerates the speed of tablet production. The highly automated machine contains over 2,000 tags that collect asset and process data into a local historian validated by the Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) standard.
Previously, Pfizer engineers had to manually query data using AVEVA™ PI DataLink™, then move it into a raw CSV file before scrubbing it and exporting to Microsoft Excel. “We’ve got the PI System, we have the historian, but all the data was still really difficult to get to,” said David Eisenberg, a manufacturing engineer at Pfizer.
Pfizer
Accessible anywhere: Pfizer uses AVEVA™ PI System™ for production analysis.
To make real-time data accessible, Pfizer set up a digital-integration strategy based on three objectives: aggregating and contextualizing data, creating a collaborative enterprise environment, and implementing visualizations and analytics to empower decision makers. Leveraging expertise from NECI, the team designed a solution that would publish all data models from the local PI System in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. With the data models in the AWS cloud, users in any location could perform reporting and analysis in Tibco Spotfire.
First, NECI performed a front-end design study to understand group goals for operations data. NECI used this research to design a dynamic, robust solution that would leverage Spotfire reports for process data while also collecting building management system (BMS) data. Thanks to NECI’s study, Pfizer was well on its way to a cloud-based solution, but success hinged on one element: context. “We all know data is only as good as the context we build around it,” said Christopher Beaupre, manager of data integration services at NECI.
The power of context
NECI deployed contextualized equipment-level and process-level data models within asset framework, the contextualization layer of AVEVA™ PI Server. This was necessary to satisfy all stakeholders – even building an asset framework structure for each production room. With the asset framework models adding rich context to the data, the team created a preliminary dashboard in AVEVA™ PI Vision™.
This floor plan dashboard overlaid all environmental and process data in one screen, allowing the rocess, automation, and facilities groups to see a hierarchical representation of each room. Coupling analysis with context, Pfizer leveraged analytics in asset framework to discover inefficiencies and build post-process entries into the models for the PCMM machine.
For example, with no equipment in place to calculate yield, a simple analytic was deployed to do so based on feeders and tablet-production speed. To provide batch context to the tablet-generation process, it also deployed an analytic that captured AVEVA PI Server’s event frame snapshots of the start and end of each batch.
Goals
- Create a single source of truth accessible across the organization
Challenges
- Data in multiple systems led to cumbersome manual processes and prevented collaboration.
Solutions
- AVEVA™ PI System
Results
- 50% faster compliance reporting
- 90% faster alarm resolution
- 50% reduction in BMS reporting
“By Pfizer already having an Enterprise Agreement, I am like a kid in a candy store. I can just use and install as many tags as I like in the PI System without any extra costs.”
David Rabon -Team Lead, Automation Services at Pfizer
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