LABORATORY INFORMATICS GUIDE 2015 | INTEGRATION
UP WITH QUALITY AND OUT WITH PAPER
Integrating informatics into industrial processes can make them more flexible and improve quality, as Tom Wilkie discovers
P
icture for a moment, if you will, a modern oil and gas plant in India – a shining exemplification of the
newly advanced economic development that characterises the four BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). Selling its products on the international market, the plant has to test each batch before export to certify that it conforms to the specifications and standards that the customer expects. So how did the analytical laboratory –
where this crucial testing and certification is carried out – communicate the certification to the dockside before shipping? Until just a few years ago, the data transmission technology was a man on a bicycle. Picture it, if you will – but not during the
monsoon season. It is, admits Kim Shah, director of
marketing and new business development for the informatics division of Thermo Fisher, a particularly egregious example. But failure of industrial plants to integrate their laboratory operations with the rest of the company’s processes is commonplace around the world – in developed economies as much as in BRIC economies or in developing nations. Thermo decided to introduce its
‘Connects’ programme some four years ago specifically to address the issue.
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www.scientific-computing.com/lig2015 Connecting up all the elements to make
a single, integrated process is critical, too, in the view of Paul Denny-Gouldson, vice president of strategic solutions at IDBS. ‘We’re seeing a massive applicability in the oil and gas industry, where some of their processes are continuous,’ he said. Interestingly, this application to oil and gas has developed out of informatics’ role in a very different area: implementing ‘quality by design’ (QbD), especially in biological processes. Biologics are growing in importance for the pharmaceutical industry, but the production of large molecule biologics is usually a continuous process, rather than batch manufacturing, and so IDBS developed its Bioprocess Execution System (BPES) with this in mind. Now it is seeing that the experience gained there can be applied to other continuous processes, as the example of oil and gas demonstrates.
CONNECTING THE ISLAND According to Shah: ‘Our sense was that, in many companies, the laboratory was treated as an island by itself where testing was done; at some velocity, information would go out from the lab to other parts of the organisation; and then some decisions would be made as to what to do with the material.’ So the company set out to
convince its customers that connecting all this information in an integrated fashion would reduce errors due to manual transcription and dramatically speed up the flow of that information. He explained: ‘We launched Integration
Manager to provide a hub, or a bus, in the middle that could connect anything to anything: all kinds of instruments at one end – high-end intelligent instruments like mass spec or chromatographs, but even pH meters and balances – and at the other side it provides connectivity to an SAP or manufacturing system.’ In a continuous rather than batch
production process, especially in biologics production, the monitoring of the process parameters is absolutely critical, according to IDBS’ Paul Denny-Gouldson. ‘These need to be used pretty much in real-time to check the system is running as it should do. We have approached this as a holistic problem and have sought to join up what are, in many cases, distinct parts of the business – so you do not end up with this age-old problem of silo data and a lack of understanding of what’s gone before. This whole concept of connecting the downstream guys with the upstream guys is really, really important. What we’ve done is provide frameworks that support the data
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