A new revolution?

I feel like we are witnessing a new industrial revolution: the digitalization of the industrial biotechnology. After some difficulties with its first wave of products, the biofuels, this industry fights back with the profitable bioproduction of new chemicals, mainly intermediates, thanks to technological advances such as synthetic biology.

In order to see more and more viable bioprocesses, the profitability of industrial production has to be maximized. A quite straightforward way to increase profitability is the Digitalization of operations. People are amazed when they realize the extent of the benefits from automating data acquisition, data management, and data analysis. Among others, people that went through the automation of operations have identified 5 major benefits: Cost reduction, Productivity, Availability, Reliability, and Performance.

Cost reduction

We usually think of increasing profitability through cost reduction and revenue increase. Raising revenues is not really easy without investing more in marketing and sales. Cost reduction is generally a preferred way to increase profitability, but capability should not be negatively impacted.

Automation of data acquisition, of data management, and of data analysis enables reducing operations costs by requiring less working hours.

Projects requires less employees dedicated to data manipulation to operate a given process for a given capacity.

In addition, automation of real-time analysis and of key performance indicators (KPI) analysis and monitoring enable the reduction of operating losses. With adequate pre-configured KPI, an operator can anticipate problems and deviations, enabling him to adjust the process by anticipation. With good KPI, an operator can also know at the very beginning of a batch whether the final yield will be great, average or underspecification.

Consequently, with the automation of data management and analysis, an operator can decide very early in the batch to let it go, to adjust the process to avoid underperformances, or to stop the batch right away avoiding unnecessary production costs when the prediction is to be under specification.

The same reasoning applies to product quality.

Productivity

Automation of data acquisition, of data management, and of data analysis enables increasing the organization capability. Legacy processes and facilities will benefit from the automation of the data cycle by freeing some personnel’s working hours. These working hours can then be invested in more valuable tasks, increasing the productivity of the organization for a given workforce.

If 50% of working hours for a team was spent on data acquisition, data integration, and data analysis, a team of 10 will become as efficient as a team of 15 with the automation of the data cycle.

Furthermore, the real-time analysis also enables the identification of the profitability optimum during a batch, reducing non-profitable time spent on this batch.

With good pre-configured KPIs, the capacity of a facility can be increased without investing in equipment nor new personnel.

It is an opportunity for the organization to increase its profits while increasing team efficiency.

Availability

One great benefit from the digitalization of operations is the availability of information as soon as it is created. When a new point is acquired from a signal or from an analytical instrument, it triggers the pipeline of calculation up to final KPI.

As a result, with the automation of data acquisition up to real-time data analysis, scientists, operators, and supervisors benefit from real-time monitoring of KPI, updated as soon as a new information is entering the system.

Availability also means that the information can be accessed from everywhere, at any time by any authorized user. A user management module with distant access is essential. Some solutions are available from the cloud. However, the vast majority of organizations in the biotech industry cares so much about their data that they prefer an on-premise solution.

A great combination is to combine the benefits of distant access with the security of on-premise installations.

Reliability

Reliability is key to automation. It also provides significant benefits to the organization such as the reduction of mistakes while performing error-prone tasks. When you remove the human factor from redundant tasks, you eliminate most batch processing errors.

As Pat Cameron wrote it in an online article, “Automated operations ensure that jobs are not forgotten or run out of sequence, that prerequisite jobs are completed successfully, that the input data is correct, and that any special processing is performed”.

While operating a bioprocess, one is most susceptible to commit mistakes during these operations:

• Manual capture of data points (ex.: typo in numbers, wrong source or line in the lab book);
• Manual transfer of data (ex.: losing the information or the support);
• Manual typing of formulas (ex.: wrong reference for a calculation);
• …

As mentioned here before, organization care very much about process data, so the security of information is crucial. The digitalization of operations enables scheduled backups of the entire dataset, from raw information up to analyzed KPI. Finally, the system should always be up & running, with the most recent version of the software.

Performance

Automation of data acquisition, of data management, and of data analysis accelerates data processing and access to KPI. Performances are increased one step further when the provided system has pre-configured bioprocess-dedicated KPI, relevant and easy to understand by non-experts. A seamless integration that fits actual facilities guarantees the compatibility of equipment and the fluidity of communications.

Finally, to maintain performance levels, the provided system for the digitalization of operations should benefit from continuous updates and improvement, guaranteed by a licensing plan.

The BioAnalyst™ was designed by BioIntelligence Technologies Inc. to realize the digitalization of bioprocesses, providing our clients with all the benefits described here before. Contact us to know how we can increase your profitability with a Relevant, Profitable and Simple&Easy solution.

Written by
Joel Sirois, P.Eng. PhD

November 2017