The Current Crisis

After the recent pandemic, the pharmaceuticals industry was hit with the biggest challenge of the decade – How to manufacture vaccine in volume and still ensure quality and precision? World Health Organization (WHO), along with the United Nations (UN), had mandated pharma companies globally to conduct their research, audits, control group testing, and manufacturing of COVID-19 vaccines at the earliest. But the strain of COVID-19 was an unknown territory, and hence the process of vaccine creation needed more time and patience.

Challenging the Normal

Prior to the pandemic, the pharma industry worked like clockwork. They had their regular drug unit, which managed the end-to-end process of over-the-counter drugs and prescription-based drugs which were in the market for a long time. Additionally, they had a research and development team that worked on new drugs and vaccines. COVID-19 changed the landscape. It challenged their overall process management including research, manufacturing, compliance, supply chain, etc.

There were thousands of research centres across the globe reporting to WHO with thousands of prototypes and experiment reports. Managing communication with the authority, and ensuring compliance became challenging for many organizations. The Indian pharmaceutical organizations embraced digital tools at their disposal to ensure process seamlessness and lossless communication.

Leveraging the IT Industry

The Indian IT industry has created a wide range of solutions to cater to the aforementioned challenges. With Government of India backing digital transformation in industries, organizations sought the opportunity to design new strategies and revise their IT spends.

The IT industry has developed new-age tools that could optimize drug manufacturing processes, enhance the workforce productivity, identify and eliminate redundant processes, and ensure seamless compliance with the authority. With the use of Innovative technologies such as AI/ML, Automation, IIoT, and AR/VR, IT industry has transformed the pharma industry and has helped them to create vaccines on-time, and meet increasing demands.

Embracing Innovative Technologies

Here are few IT tools that could help the pharma industry to optimize their processes with digital transformation:

1. Artificial Intelligence (AI): With the volume of user data at disposal, organizations can use AI to identity patterns in control-group data, and help to predict and eliminate users from the control who are prone to fail the test due to specific underlying conditions.
2. Automation: Automation helps to create reports from the data collected from the control group, such as their heart rate, vision, motor skills, etc. Also, Automation can be helpful in the quality process, where bots are created to identify anomalies in drugs’ prototype data and separate the good from the bad.
3. Compliance solutions: Regulatory Communications can be challenging due to volume of users involved and audits performed. Platform-based regulatory communication solutions can help to create and store all the communication at one place, to ensure timely response to all regulatory requests, adhere to compliance, and ensure lossless communication.
4. Digital Twins: Organizations can leverage new-age solutions such as digital twins that allows them to create a parallel digital footprint, similar to their existing one. It will enable to analyse processes, identify areas of optimization, and will suggest changes to maximize productivity and output.

In Conclusion

Indian Pharmaceutical Industries must embrace digital transformation to ensure maximum output, and timely compliance. With government initiatives and subsidiaries supporting technology inclusion in businesses, the pharma industry must leverage innovative technologies and design robust business models in order to become proactive and future-ready.