At the Emerson Exchange 2025 Conference in San Antonio, Texas, Emerson’s Michalle Adkins collected feedback from the Life Sciences team on their Meet the Experts session. The key reminder for participants, customers, Impact Partners, and Emerson subject matter experts was that we are all in this together, working hard to ultimately provide therapies to patients. A technology roadmap was shared, highlighting the path to more connected sites, systems, and the enterprise. From a product development perspective, the session featured discussions involving foundational connectivity, module enhancements, a scalable data fabric, integrated applications, and an intelligent platform specific to the Life Sciences sector.
The session included time for breakout teams to discuss these developments in more detail. The breakout teams included:
- Seamless tech transfer
- Simple to sophisticated
- Connected ecosystems
- Unified Operations
- Approvals and data exchanges
- Data-driven enterprise insights
- Interoperable AI-enhanced ecosystem
Shown below are some of the perspectives from each of the breakout teams.
Seamless Tech Transfer
- Some challenges noted: communications across departments and between different disciplines, timelines, transferring from one area to another, including CDMOs, and a lack of standards
- Priorities for tech transfer: automatic transfer of site recipe to master recipe, easy modeling to support facility fit analysis, easy control strategy conversion to process step requirements, and easy import of R&D lab recipe into a general or site recipe
Simple to Sophisticated
- A few of the challenges noted for authoring recipes: takes too long, complicated, standardization/not following standards, complexities for multiproduct facilities
- Some recommendations on how to simplify: standardized recipe object reports for where embedded objects are used, AI tools for accelerating recipe writing, templates, recipe comparisons (particularly for tech transfers)
Interoperable AI Enhanced Ecosystem
- Already using AI for code assistance, general work aids, creating SOPs, creating training, data analysis, a little bit of everything
- Responses to where AI can make the most immediate impact: Document preparation, engineering assistance, process monitoring, fault detection, trend monitoring, advanced process controls, prediction of product performance, and/or control of product quality
Unified Operations, Approvals, and Data Exchanges
- Company goals that could be enabled with these capabilities: flexibility, real-time release, faster transfers, faster investigations, fewer deviations, interoperability
- Key requirements noted: remove data silos, data availability including metadata, common understanding of requirements, inter-facility communications, and change management champions
- Voters felt that their organizations fell within the 2–5-year time horizon for readiness to use a unified enterprise framework.
Data Driven Enterprise Insights
- What does it mean to you? Standardization, seamless connectivity, faster decision making, alignment, accessibility/visibility, efficiency, analytics
- Most of the team felt that 100% of the shopfloor data should be available in the enterprise data fabric
- Observed powerful data-driven insights: planning, process analysis, accurate dosages for personalized medicines, decrease in release times, root cause determination, identifying bottlenecks, and schedule optimization
Actions have already been taken from these insights and incorporated into roadmaps, as appropriate, for the Emerson Life Sciences portfolio and lifecycle support.
To follow these advancements, follow the Emerson | DeltaV Automation Platform LinkedIn showcase page, mark your calendars to attend the May 19-21 Emerson Exchange 2026 Conference in Dubai, UAE, and work with your local sales team to arrange Technical Information Exchange (TIE) meetings and a visit to our Life Sciences Showroom for a deeper dive.
