An interesting paper was presented recently at the Honeywell User Group (HUG) meeting as captured by Pharmaceutical Manufacturing magazine’s On Pharma blog. The post, Abbott dispels MES myths (Notes from HUG II) is interesting for the $1.3 Million USD estimated annual savings from applying Manufacturing Execution System (MES) software.
Why I make particular note of this project is that it was accomplished with the help of Emerson Life Sciences expertise in deliverying ANSI/ISA-95 (S95) solutions.
I caught up with Principal Engineer, Josh Gangl in our Life Sciences / Food and Beverage industry organization who was involved in this project. The selected MES software, POMSnet, was integrated by Josh and the team with the plant’s DeltaV Batch system.
As the On Pharma post notes:
For Abbott, the MES was a critical aspect of its pursuit of an integrated and paperless environment.
Josh described the challenge as connecting to manual processing pieces like manual operator instructions and procedures, executing weigh and dispense operations, and other non-automated procedures. These were connected with the continuous, batch, alarm, event, and operator actions performed in the DeltaV system to create an electronic batch record. In addition, batch definition and scheduling was done in the MES layer and integrated with the DeltaV system via campaigns.
As Abbott’s David Kircher noted in the On Pharma post:
The customizations we did were related to integrations and custom reports, but everything else was out of the box.
This helped minimize the complexity of the integration effort yet still provide savings from reduced documented exceptions, reduced incorrect operator actions, and reduced documentation errors which contributed to the annual savings realized from the project.
