Thursday, March 27, 2008

The future of pharma manufacturing OK, I'll admit it. I'm at the Champions sports bar in the Marriott across the street from the Pennsylvania convention center at the close of today's Interphex--and before dinner at ElVez. Finally waded through my correspondence. Today was a much better day at Interphex--for everyone concerned. The hall was pretty much packed with attendees. I had a number of great meetings. I started the day with the CEO of ParSec. It's a software company that provides tools for manufacturers to achieve real time performance management. Stuff like OEE and the like. Emerson Process Management had a press event in the morning. I can't get at the press kit right now to get details. Much of the conference was about wireless. I already know quite a lot about that. The interesting thing for me was that they told us the uptake on the wireless starter kit was good. No huge projects, yet, but lots of proof of concept pilots and retrofits right now. When I get to the kit, I'll reproduce the part about modeling a life sciences process and the progress they're making about proving it with real cell lines. This is work of Greg McMillen and Terry Blevins of the Modeling and Control blog plus Michael Boudreau (I didn't get a card and just looked at his badge briefly, so if I butchered the spelling of his name I'll make it up to him). I met Terry and told him how much I appreciated their work on the blog and was honored by his appreciation of this little hobby of mine. I promise more later when I have time to think. The most interesting part of the day--even more than Cheryl telling me she's figuring out my sense of humor ;-) -- was a pair of interviews. I talked with Wolfgang Steiding of head of Siemens' pharma effort. Told him that given his position in the industry, I was interested in his view of the future of pharma manufacturing. And he told me! This relates to Frede Vinthger's presentation at WBF about flexible modular manufacturing. Steiding had a similar, but more comprehensive view. He says not to expect change next year, but definitely as pharma moves from the blockbuster age (think cars when there were few models) to the age of targeted or personalized medicines. That will require a new manufacturing paradigm. Immediately following this talk, I met Anjoli Katria, founder and chief marketing officer of Conformia. That company, described in a few quick words, does things like PLM for pharma or knowledge management enterprise software for pharma. It's a SAP partner and approaches almost the same vision that Steiding expressed from the enterprise down rather than instrumentation up. Doing what I do best, I introduced the two and left them in deep conversation. I smell a great Automation World article (my competitors say that they don't read this blog, so I'm not worried about giving away my secrets ;-) ). 6:23:37 PM    comment []

Interphex 2008 I left about 10:30 from the WBF meeting to drive down to Philadelphia from Valley Forge to get to Interphex. Walked the entire show floor at least three times. Had no problem getting around--very few attendees. Not sure what's happening with the show, but I've heard that people are going to the Puerto Rico one in February. Talked to GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms about PAT (process analytic technology)--it has a Proficy PAT application--but PAT is becoming almost passe perhaps mostly used now during the drug discovery process. Bart Reitter told me that the GE F emphasis is really on operational excellence and that PAT is just part of it. Also saw CTC Parker--the operator interface part of the company. They have a display that serves up Web pages via Ethernet. Trick is that it uses Adobe Flash. So the remote displays are not just of a screen scraper application that shows only what the local display has live. Remote displays in this system can see anything available regardless of the live display. And flash technology is pretty cool. More after today's run. Emerson Process Management has the only big press conference among the automation companies today. In fact, I ran past all the automation companies and saw almost no one that I knew. Very unusual. 6:31:16 AM    comment []