The Industrial Internet of Things Driving Pharma Line Integration

Changes come slow to pharmaceutical packagers, but the push is on to integrate lines. A study released last Fall from PMMI Business Intelligence says serialization is driving the change.

Jun 6th, 2017

“Integrated communication is always desirable,” said one packaging line manager, “but a challenge to implement with so many different pieces of equipment. The most important question is: who is going to oversee the data collection and who’s going to mine and interpret that data.”

Typical types of data being collected on production/packaging lines includes: production rates, scrap/waste, run time, OEE, maintenance diagnostics, product tracking, fault time and batch control.

Concerns among respondents range from temporary internet outages to trust issues with cloud storage. MQTT (Message Que Telemetry Transport) is a machine-to-machine data transfer protocol that is gaining support for IIoT, and holds promise for pharmaceutical line integration.

Source: PMMI Business Intelligence, Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices 2016: Trends and Opportunities in Packaging Operations.

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