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Manufacturing All for one


Covid-19 might have brought the need for 4.0 technologies into the open, but the problems the pandemic exposed were as much of an issue three years ago, when the WEF set up the Global Lighthouse Network of advanced manufacturers, as they are today. “The Global Lighthouse Network came about after a WEF and McKinsey & Company white paper emerged, which said most companies that are trying to implement these 4IR technologies get stuck piloting,” Cronin explains. “We realised that 70% of companies never actually end up being able to scale the implementation of these technologies... so, we said, ‘Well, if 70% get stuck, we know that 30% don’t. What if we could identify the 1% who are really doing it the absolute best, where [they have] multiple use-cases at scale and are truly seeing the benefit of these technologies in their production systems?’” The lighthouses are that 1% from across production sectors – including electronic, automotive, oil and gas, and pharmaceutical – who are leading the way in 4IR. At the time of writing, the latest expansion added 15 new lighthouse factories to the network (making 69 in total), including a Johnson & Johnson consumer health factory in Sweden, the fifth J&J subsidiary in the network and the tenth pharmaceutical or medical product manufacturing site. The beacons are glowing; a revolution, it seems, is growing. As the opening line of the most recent white paper on the Global Lighthouse Network states: “Digital is no longer optional”. If there’s a lesson to be learnt from these companies, it doesn’t just inhere in 4.0 agility, but in the seismic shift being seen across sectors, companies, and institutions towards better communication and collaboration. “I know that’s not necessarily a techy response,” Cronin admits, “but what we are seeing is that you can become more innovative, more efficient, more sustainable, if you can figure out different models of actually engaging with data across the players.” Unsurprisingly, there’s been resistance to this in the past. For a long time, as Cronin observes, “companies were afraid to do that because of IP reasons, but the technologies themselves are allowing you to protect your data while also sharing things that are mutually beneficial.”


The result is technological homogenisation across different industry sectors – which is, in part, what makes 4.0 such a revolutionary turn in manufacturing history. It’s why the WEF created the Advanced Manufacturing and Production community and platform. “Traditionally,” Cronin explains, “people had thought about vertical industry sectors – I’m in the aerospace sector, I’m in the automobile sector – but what we realised was that the technologies that are impacting manufacturing are sector agnostic. “[And when it comes to] other global trends that are impacting supply chains – whether that’s geopolitical and trade realignments, or climate change – it doesn’t


World Pharmaceutical Frontiers / www.worldpharmaceuticals.net


matter what sector you’re in and so the technologies are transforming across industries.”


Talking therapies


Kelly O’Brien, assistant lecturer and researcher at Limerick Institute of Technology, echoes Cronin’s notion of sector agnosticism. “It’s very exciting from the research point of view,” she says, noting the use of virtual and augmented reality technologies, which many believed were purely for entertainment, to train manufacturing staff. “We’re talking about technologies that we all know so well, but applying them in very different ways.”


O’Brien has been working on a research project that looks at how the academic sector can help SMEs to get on to the 4IR ladder. Like Cronin, she also stresses an urgent need for collaboration and transparency. “It has very much been the case,” she notes, “that there is research going on in the colleges that has nowhere to go and there are companies that have the money to spend, but they’re not sure how to spend it.” The collaborative model that she outlines is different to Cronin’s – focused instead on connecting industry and academia – but the point remains the same: people need to start talking.


It does seem like an unusual response from the tech industry, and a surprisingly human one in a topic centred around AI. Then again, if Covid-19 has revealed anything, it’s that if we don’t learn to communicate now – whether that means supply chain transparency or keeping in touch with distant relatives – then perhaps we never will.


The collaboration between the FDA and NIST was born out of the Covid-19-triggered revelation that supply chains can be disrupted; but it recognises that there’s more to solve than the pandemic. “The FDA and regulated industry have to accelerate the adoption of advanced and smart manufacturing technologies to strengthen the nation’s public health infrastructure,” Turney explains.


As one example of the technology being developed out of the collaboration, Turney offers the modularised process, which “entails breaking manufacturing down into parts that can be plugged into each other and still function, much like train cars can connect to any engine”. Modularised processes make it possible to switch production from one pharmaceutical or regenerative medicine product to another, in days or hours, using the same facility. It might be a 4.0 technology, but without communication, transparency, and cooperation, it would be just another bright idea. It’s Watt’s steam engine all over again – existing technologies being adopted, altered, repurposed and modulated to change the manufacturing process for good. And over this new revolution, Watt’s train car still presides; that material archetype of industrial innovation haunts even the most ephemeral of modern manufacturing processes. ●


41 10


Pharmaceutical and medical product manufacturing sites in the


WEF advanced manufacturing lighthouse network. WEF


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