Mescada: Benefiting the Pharma Landscape with Industry 4.0 Principles

‘Industrie 4.0’ was coined by the German Federal Government as a national strategy to promote computerization of manufacturing processes. Today, digital technologies have become an integral part of automating operations, streamlining processes, and integrating different manufacturing departments that are otherwise not adequately connected. The concept of Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing is not a one-off implementation; it is a mindset and a continuous improvement journey. Companies need to have an appetite for change that goes hand in hand with accepting that the road ahead will not always be straight and easy going. The ability to change and adopt new ideas is essential to gain competitive advantages. It is only in the recent past that players in the pharmaceutical industry—who, for more than 50 years, relied on batch manufacturing—began embracing this visionary notion.

This is where, Melbourne based industrial automation and process control provider, Mescada with their highly qualified team of control system specialists and Industry 4.0 architects delivers enterprise-grade solutions, from automation and network design to plant optimization.

Ian Tribe, the sales manager of Mescada, highlights that pharmaceutical manufacturing companies are struggling with the burden of documentation and data validation. These tasks are not seen as value adds, but rather as necessary hurdles that need to be met in order to complete a project.The current, disparate legacy systems that they have in place don’t work well together and lead to time and cost wastage.

Enterprises also lack a holistic Industry 4.0 view across all of their departments which ultimately keeps them from narrowing the functional gaps within their ongoing processes. “In practice, overcoming the initial, ‘where to start inertia,’ is more a case of having the right organization-wide mindset; viewing data as an asset and having an appetite for using new ideas and technologies to exploit and manage both internal and external data assets,” states Ian Tribe. To this end, Mescada follows a unique approach toward engaging with their clients early on, making the right decisions up front, and creating a holistic outlook to the entire plant life cycle. From plant design, through operations and maintenance to upgrade, the company ensures information assets are preserved, reused and integrated across all these phases. Mescada also streamlines workflows associated with systems ranging from ERP to process control systems (PCS) and maps out their customers’ unique Industry 4.0 journey. Having real, hands-on experience with a broad range of systems and industries allows Mescada to apply the learnings they’ve gained by working in other critical industries, such as chemical and water, and use it to benefit pharma customers. The company also possesses diverse experts ranging from chemical engineers to cloud and IT networking infrastructure professionals. “The way our team comes together, exchanges ideas and solutions while working on challenges, not only, helps us achieve great results but also helps develop enhanced, long term, relationships with our clients—making it a win-win situation for all,” asserts Ian.

Ian exemplifies his statement with the success story of one their clients, a major global pharmaceutical, wherein Mescada delivered and automated warehouse providing accurate real-time inventory location and consumption information along with high speed put away and retrieval. This has considerably helped them to reduce their cost as well as inventory requirements.

With many such success stories up their sleeve, the road map ahead for Mescada looks quite strategic and promising. The company has already started expanding their geographical footprints into Asia and the US and is eager to begin utilizing new digital twin- and cloud technologies to help customers gain value out of their data assets and optimize manufacturing processes.