Now they needed to break through manufacturing roadblocks to bring millions of them to the front lines
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread through the world, demand for diagnostic kits exploded. Our client, a $60B+ global pharma giant, had developed one of the world’s most accurate tests. Now, they had to scale a complex, highly regulated manufacturing process across their fragmented global operations.
With stakes this high, they needed a partner they could trust to get it right: Marlabs
The company had grown mainly through acquisition, so it was operating 40 different lines with a hodgepodge of different manufacturing systems, data schema, hardware, and software. Slow and error-prone manual batch tracking, reporting, and analysis was creating bottlenecks and slowing release times. They desperately needed to inject automation and advanced data science into their manufacturing and supply chain operations…along with more powerful AI, data visualization, and automated report generation to track product quality, provide information to regulators, and keep manufacturing lines supplied. And with the world begging for more COVID-19 test kits, they needed it all as soon as possible.
The client knew that they needed better data and analytics to break through manufacturing logjams. So we quickly stepped in to build a dynamic and automated “single source of truth” for data across all operations—and apply AI, machine learning, and Analytics to it to optimize test kit quality, production planning, and regulatory reporting.
Each test kit has hundreds of quality parameters that need to be tracked during production. Job 1 was bringing this data—captured in many different legacy systems under varied data schema— into a single, clean, dynamic, and real-time database. Marlabs teams used a range of AI-enhanced ETL, mapping, and integration tools to extract and organize data from all manufacturing facilities and lines and bring it into a single central database. Then, we built an automated analysis tool that provides dynamic and flexible visualization, rapid drilldowns into specific components, and other critical analyses. Now our client has a near-real-time way to track individual kit quality, find and address manufacturing issues within a batch, and provide critical quality assurance reports to regulators.
A tsunami of demand had overwhelmed the company’s ability to allocate materials, prioritize orders, and manage inventory, turning “just in time” to “just before disaster.” So we quickly put into place an automated, analytics-rich, and scalable planning system that can prioritize orders, route raw materials, create inventory plans, and optimize production schedules. To manage today’s extreme supply fluctuations, the solution performs extensive scenario planning that allow it to assess demands and risks for each item on the Bill of Materials and dynamically reallocate raw materials as needed.
In the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) must review and sign off on each test kit batch before it can be shipped. When we arrived on the scene, our client had been manually collecting and formatting critical quality and manufacturing data for these submissions. We rapidly built a digitized, end-to-end automated process that has cut report generation and submission time down from several hours to under a minute. Now, the FDA gets sent accurate, correctly formatted information in near-real time, with zero manual effort.
Our client is now trusting us with:
