|
Emerson Process Management has long been a leader in supplying automation products, technology and systems to the Life Sciences industry.
Tom Diederich, vice president, Life Sciences sales & marketing for Emerson Process Management, provides the leadership and direction for the company's industry initiative. In his 23 years with Emerson, Tom has held several corporate roles, including global director of systems business development, director of the systems business for Central and Eastern Europe, and global Marquee Account director for various life science accounts.
Emerson Process Management was the recipient of the Frost and Sullivan
customer value enhancement award for Pharmaceutical Industry Automation Solutions. In a recent interview with Sath Rao, director of the Industrial Automation and Process Control practice, Tom took time to discuss the key customer trends, Emerson Process Management's unique value proposition, and the key customer best practices.
Sath Rao (Frost & Sullivan): Congratulations on receiving the Frost & Sullivan Award. What do you think are some of the key factors behind the success of Emerson within the vaccine, biologics, and active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) businesses of the life sciences industry?
Tom Diederich (Emerson Process Management): Thank you! We are pleased and honored to be recognized by Frost & Sullivan and the industry for this prestigious award.
Certainly we owe our success in the business to continuously adding value that helps our customers succeed. In 2006, our
Life Sciences business contributed to Emerson Process Management's robust 16 percent rise in fiscal sales that followed a growth of 13.5 percent worldwide in 2005, and 9.1% growth in 2004.
Prior to operating as Emerson Process Management, our company was named Fisher-Rosemount, and was composed of leading instrumentation brands like Rosemount, Fisher, Micro Motion, Brooks, Rosemount Analytical, and Fisher-Rosemount
Systems, each of which had a very strong focus on life sciences. These divisions had been developing and continue to develop leading products and services for the life sciences industry. So we have historically had a strong commitment to life sciences.
Now as a larger and stronger Emerson Process Management, we have further increased this life sciences focus by continually improving these brands and digitally integrating them to create the
PlantWeb digital plant
architecture. In doing so, we formed a single automation architecture that
delivers unmatched capabilities, creating what is the backbone of our success
within life sciences and other industries.
There has been a lot of change in the life sciences industry in the past decade. If we were to roll the clock back four or five years, the industry was in very good financial shape; share price was strong and profits good. When companies had an issue, they had the cash flow to address it quickly and effectively, but they weren't doing so in an integrated, holistic way.
Today, manufacturers are facing a totally different environment. They are under significant pressure to improve pipelines, reduce costs, improve quality, and reduce time-to-market, all with smaller or shrinking staffs. Recognizing these pressures, we have worked hard to develop new services, techniques and methodologies to help our clients achieve those goals by increasing uptime, improving throughput and quality, shortening time-to-release, reducing maintenance costs, and reducing the cost to implement projects. And our experience shows that the earlier we get involved, the higher the efficiencies and savings we can bring to projects and the ongoing operations.
Sath Rao (Frost & Sullivan):
Could you provide us some examples of some specific customer success stories last year?
Tom Diederich (Emerson Process Management): Let me cite a couple of instances where, by working closely with the customer, we have combined our PlantWeb technologies with our consultative and project services to deliver significant benefits to our customer.
On the project side, we have spent a lot of time and effort enhancing and extending our technical standards library, project implementation tools and methodologies, and tools for integrated commissioning and qualification. And we have done this on a global basis, taking best practices from every facet of our business and applying those capabilities and standards to all of our Centers of Excellence. These improve our customer's ability to significantly reduce risk of schedule and budget.
On one customer's project we brought the full breadth of these capabilities, tools and methodologies to bear and delivered the project 2 months early while achieving savings in the range of 30 percent.
We also have long history of improving client operations by reducing cycle time, and deviations, improving through-put and avoiding capital expenditures. At one client's facility, we worked together to take a very broad view of the customer's operations. Once completed, we collectively determined we could improve unit operation performance and overall batch review and release times by updating their instrumentation and process and manufacturing controls. So we updated instrumentation to improve measurements, provided advanced controls for the distillation columns and batch reactors, and converted from paper batch records to integrated, electronic batch execution and records. The result? We reduced the amount of time the client spent reviewing release documentation by 56%, while increasing throughput by 33%! We also eliminated the deviations they had been seeing. And because of these improvements the customer was able to avoid a multi-million dollar CAPEX expansion project. We found a hidden plant!
In another case we implemented an
OpX Advantage study to help a customer improve
operations. This began with an overall assessment of several of the customer's facilities. This was done by our Life Sciences consultants who go to the customer site for what is typically a 2-3 day review of facility operations. Once on site, they explored the customer's manufacturing processes, looked at the existing automation technologies and strategies, and had discussions with employees and management. This 3 day look gave us a good understanding of the issues they faced and became the basis for identifying areas of improvement. Over the next weeks Emerson worked closely with all functional groups within the organization to specifically identify and quantify these opportunities. Because of the complex nature of today's life science manufacturing environment, this is probably the most important part of the effort. You obviously need a thorough understanding of the problems the customer faces, but equally important is how all the various groups and disciplines within a given company interact around a given operation and how they will be affected by any suggested improvements. From this detailed understanding, Emerson and the client jointly fashioned a recommendation that uniquely addressed the problems and justified the solution.
The end result was the identification of multi-millions of dollars of savings at each of the facilities resulting from reductions in deviation and errors, and reductions in operations release & review man-hours.
Sath Rao (Frost & Sullivan): The need to balance risk and compliance with innovation within the pharmaceutical industry is a huge challenge and we think that a step towards achieving this has been taken after the initiation of the PAT by the FDA. Can you throw some light on some of the initiatives taken by Emerson with regards to PAT?
Tom Diederich (Emerson Process Management): We are happy to see life science companies acknowledging the benefits of a risk based approach to projects and operations. We see PAT as a major opportunity and have been working with a number of customers developing a comprehensive strategy for data integration, analysis and control. And while we continue to work on how to best integrate this real-time analytical data into closed loop control, we are also working on advanced measurements and alarming techniques, advanced process control, full integration of process and production data and abnormal situation prevention. What we're learning from all of these efforts is that PAT shouldn't be viewed in a vacuum. Simply put, we believe PAT should be one facet of an overall Operational Excellence strategy that drives manufacturing to higher levels of performance.
Sath Rao (Frost & Sullivan): When we speak about the automation industry in general, pressure on profits seems to be frequent topic. How has this impacted the profitability of automation suppliers?
Tom Diederich (Emerson Process Management): Clearly our customers are pressured. And they are turning to us to help drive costs down and out. That is making us a stronger supplier and is strengthening the sense of partnership we and our customers are feeling. We have entered into a number of alliances that are focused on how we can work more collaboratively to improve productivity and become more competitive. It begins with an open discussion of what needs to be done and figuring out how best to do it. It then often moves to broadening scope, enhancing tools and
technologies, implementing Main Automation Contractor (MAC) or Main Instrument Vendor (MIV) initiatives or undertaking comprehensive multi-project implementation programs (MIP). It requires open communication, trust and a true sense of partnership and the benefits can be significant.
Sath Rao (Frost & Sullivan): What do you think are some of the best practices followed by the industry leaders when it comes to automation and manufacturing?
Tom Diederich (Emerson Process Management): There are a number of "best practices" that are benefiting our life science customers; I mentioned MAC, MIV and MIP earlier. We're also working closely with customers on Extended Calibration Intervals, Certified Factory Calibrations and Integrated Commissioning & Qualification.
With Extended Calibration Intervals, we're leveraging the long term stability of our family of measurement devices like our pressure transmitters, including 5-year stability of our Rosmount 3051C and 10-year stability for the 3051S Ultra transmitter. We provided accelerated aging data to client quality groups to demonstrate transmitter performance. Client Quality groups have accepted and agreed, and allowed maintenance to extend the calibration interval by one or two cycles; i.e., from one year to two or in some cases three years. When we look at a large organization, we're talking about savings in the range of $1 to $3 million annually!
Certified Factory Calibration eliminates the redundant field calibration of a newly received instruments or valves. We worked with our customers, modified our calibration and packaging procedures, helped develop client installation procedures and presented to the quality groups. Once quality personnel understood the procedure, they agreed. This translates to savings of about $150 to $200 per device. On a typical life science project that can tally up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
With respect to PlantWeb Enabled ICQ we're building on the efforts of the ISPE Community of Practice for Commissioning and Qualification by leveraging the communication capabilities of our field devices and the PlantWeb architecture to reduce or eliminate manual data entry during the commissioning and qualification process. Not only does this save time, but it reduces required manpowerand eliminates manual errors during the commissioning and qualification process.
Sath Rao (Frost & Sullivan): Absolutely! That is a very valid point that you have made. In terms of the evolving change in the relationships between the pharmaceutical and life sciences companies from a traditional vendor-based to a more partnership-based approach, is a great way to achieve new benchmarks in operational excellence.
Tom Diederich (Emerson Process Management): Agreed. It's all about higher levels of partnering, open communication and trust and we are very pleased to see this emerging trend.
Sath Rao (Frost & Sullivan): Are customers now looking at the total life-cycle cost?
Tom Diederich (Emerson Process Management): Yes! This is becoming an increasingly important consideration in customer's decisions and something Emerson has been focused on for years. We understand a facility needs to start-up on time, on budget and run efficiently and profitably for decades. And our customers want and demand an automation architecture and partner that can deliver that. We talked about lowering risk on budget and schedule for projects and improving ongoing operations through Operational Excellence. We are also heavily investing in our
SureService program. SureService offers an array of support services that help our customer meet their business objectives and reduce operating and service costs, from our basic Foundation Support up to Guardian, which include remote system diagnostics, a user-configurable dashboard that provides info that is specific to your site and system, a real time service alert program and regular system analysis reports.
Sath Rao (Frost & Sullivan): When a customer looks at automation solution suppliers, what does Emerson Process Management offer as differentiators in the pharmaceuticals and life sciences industry?
Tom Diederich (Emerson Process Management): That's a great question!
I believe there are a number of things that set Emerson apart from its competitors. The first things that come to mind are our financial strength, industry lauded planning process, and the stability of our management team. I think our customer's appreciate the fact that they can count on us for the long haul.
Additionally, almost every Emerson Process Management division is #1 or #2 in its market and our customers tell us annually, through CONTROL
magazine's
Readers Choice Awards, that we provide the best automation products and services on a global basis. Third, we've pulled all of our capabilities together into a fully integrated automation architecture - PlantWeb - that provides our customers with a truly integrated manufacturing environment, from plant floor up through manufacturing to the executive level. This combination allows Emerson to deliver better decision support and lower risk operational performance to clients.
Sath Rao (Frost & Sullivan): We have the highest regard for Emerson. We believe that you guys are doing several things right. That is one of the main reasons why your company continue to grow and customers swear by Emerson.
Tom Diederich (Emerson Process Management): Thank you very much for the kind words. We think we are headed in the right direction. We think that we are a good partner to the industry, and this is reflected in the levels of partnerships and customer collaboration that we are honored to enjoy from across the industry globally. We are very proud of our capabilities and, most of all, the value that we can bring to our customers. We are committed to growing that value, and getting better as a supplier and partner.
|
