Digitalisation is crucial for the industry to reduce its carbon footprint and has the potential to cut energy use by 20%.
CPI, in collaboration with global leaders in digital pharma, including AstraZeneca, Atos, AWS, Capgemini, GSK, and Siemens, through its Digital Membership consortium, has launched a pioneering Digital Architecture designed to revolutionise the process of pharmaceutical manufacturing.
Digital Architecture: A Clear Roadmap for Digital Transformation
This cutting-edge framework provides a clear roadmap for integrating digital technologies, overcoming data silos, and enabling real-time release for drug manufacturing. In doing so, it empowers companies to reduce the time taken for product release from days to hours and ultimately drives the industry toward autonomous pharmaceutical manufacturing.
Digitalisation is becoming an urgent priority for pharmaceutical companies, as it plays a pivotal role in driving the decarbonisation of manufacturing processes. With health systems accounting for 5% of global carbon emissions, it’s estimated that digitalisation can cut energy consumption in manufacturing by up to 20%.
Overcoming Challenges with Digital Architecture Integration
For pharma companies striving to implement an autonomous pharmaceutical manufacturing strategy, the challenges of integrating legacy infrastructure, managing vast amounts of siloed data, and justifying capital investment have long been barriers to progress.
The Digital Architecture provides organisations with a structured, step-by-step approach to overcoming these challenges, making seamless digital transformation an achievable reality. It is a first-of-its-kind solution that enables pharmaceutical companies to incrementally integrate their Operational Technology/Information Technology (OT/IT) infrastructure, avoiding the risks of a full-scale digital overhaul. By providing a domain-driven, technology-agnostic approach, this architecture ensures that companies can implement automation at their own pace.
Global Leaders Support Digital Architecture Adoption
The architecture serves as both a roadmap and a coded blueprint and has been developed through the Digital Membership consortium at CPI’s Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre, with global leaders in pharmaceuticals, technology, and academic institutions.
Francis O’Doherty, Director, Operations IT at AstraZeneca, said: “AstraZeneca has successfully leveraged the work of this CPI collaboration to define our Autonomous Manufacturing strategy, which has supported our vision of implementing industry-leading pharmaceutical manufacturing and accelerated the development of our future-ready IT architecture.
“A technology-agnostic Digital Architecture empowers us to choose the right solutions for our enterprise, ensuring flexibility and adaptability. Together, we are pioneering a transformative journey towards a digital-first and sustainable future, where AI-driven automation is augmented with human insights and oversight.”
Digital Architecture Helps Remove Barriers to Digitalisation
Dave Tudor, Managing Director of Pharma, HealthTech, and Quality at CPI, said: “The pharmaceutical industry stands at a crossroads. Companies must embrace digitalisation to stay competitive, but the complexity of integrating digital technologies has been a significant challenge.
“CPI’s Digital Architecture removes these barriers, offering a structured, technology-agnostic roadmap that allows companies to scale digital solutions efficiently. Our collaboration with global leaders ensures that this solution is practical, actionable, and aligned with the industry's future needs.”
The Future of Autonomous Pharmaceutical Manufacturing with Digital Architecture
Samantha Jones, Atos Senior Vice President, Healthcare, Life Sciences, and Manufacturing, said: "Together with CPI’s Digital Membership consortium, our objective is to improve the availability of therapies to patients. Using our extensive experience in digital transformation and blueprinting techniques, we have created assets that de-risk digital implementation and accelerate time to value for new processes.”
Dave Berry, Director of Digital Pharma at CPI, said: “The Digital Architecture is more than just a framework – it’s a coded resource designed to help pharmaceutical manufacturers digitalise their processes more rapidly; in a more strategic and targeted way. It enables companies to address high-impact digitalisation projects today, whilst still knowing those projects will aid the bigger picture of autonomous manufacturing.
“By moving forward with an autonomous pharmaceutical manufacturing strategy, companies can streamline operations, enhance regulatory compliance, and accelerate time-to-market for new therapies.”
Collaborative Success of Digital Architecture
Rob Pears, UK Head of Life Sciences, Manufacturing, and Automotive at Capgemini, said, “We’re committed to accelerating innovation in pharma, alongside our clients and partners. This new Digital Architecture has demonstrated the impact that can be achieved through the collaborative spirit of the ecosystem, and we’ve already seen impressive results across industry. The future of autonomous manufacturing lies in digitalisation and harnessing the power of data, and we look forward to seeing further positive outcomes through this approach for the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors.”
