It’s difficult for a company to achieve excellence when batches are lost and maintenance crews must fight fires due to equipment failure. Still, solutions are available now to address these and other issues in the pharmaceutical industry.
Most life sciences plants and facilities face many issues impacting reliability, throughput, and uptime. For example, a bioreactor’s agitator slows down during a batch process without the operator realizing it, and the result is a quarantined batch and production schedule delay while it’s addressed.
In another common scenario, a unit’s control system says the pH of a given batch has moved out of its tolerance range, but plant personnel cannot quickly determine if it is due to a process upset or a malfunctioning sensor. Grab samples must be analyzed in the lab to verify, delaying production.
Or a pump used to empty a bioreactor at a critical time is malfunctioning. It may be a problem with the variable frequency drive, m…