Unleashing the power of digital transformation to accelerate COVID-19 test kit production

Introduction

During the 2020 pandemic, the unprecedented global demand for diagnostic COVID-19 test kits put immense pressure on pharmaceutical companies to scale production. At that time, a $608+ billion pharmaceutical had already developed a very accurate COVID-19 diagnostic test, but faced significant challenges meeting demand.

Fragmented global operations and disparate manufacturing systems hindered the company's ability to respond quickly. The company turned to Marlabs to help overcome these obstacles and streamline their production processes.

Challenge

The pharmaceutical giant’s existing manufacturing systems resulted from multiple acquisitions, creating 40 production lines with various hardware, software, and data schemas. This complex environment made it difficult to track, report, and analyze data efficiently.

Consequently, the company struggled to maintain production quality, provide regulators with the required information, and manage its supply chain effectively. They needed a comprehensive digital transformation to address these challenges and trusted Marlabs to deliver.

The primary challenge was building an automated and integrated manufacturing information system to streamline the company’s operations. This involved overcoming the following obstacles:

• Diverse data schemas and legacy systems
• Manual batch tracking, reporting, and analysis
• Inefficient materials planning and allocation
• Time-consuming and error-prone compliance submissions

With the world urgently needing more COVID-19 test kits, the company needed to act swiftly to address these challenges.

Solution

Marlabs devised a comprehensive solution to optimize the company’s manufacturing and supply chain operations by leveraging advanced technologies such as AI, machine learning, and analytics. The following initiatives were undertaken:

Taming the Data Deluge

Marlabs implemented AI-enhanced ETL, mapping, and integration tools to extract, organize, and consolidate data from all manufacturing facilities and lines into a single central database.

The team also developed an automated analysis tool that provided dynamic visualization, rapid drill-downs, and critical analyses, enabling real-time test kit quality and regulatory compliance tracking.

Streamlining Materials Planning

Marlabs introduced an automated, analytics-rich, and scalable planning system to prioritize orders, route raw materials, create inventory plans, and optimize production schedules.

In addition, this solution performed extensive scenario planning to assess demand and risks for each item on the bill of materials (BOM), allowing for dynamic reallocation of raw materials as needed.

Accelerating Compliance Submissions

To expedite FDA approvals, Marlabs developed a digitized, end-to-end automated process that reduced report generation and submission time from several hours to under a minute.

This allowed accurate, correctly formatted information to be sent to the FDA in near-real time, eliminating manual effort.

Results

Building Trust and Future Collaboration

The 2020 partnership between the pharmaceutical company and Marlabs highlights the critical role of digital transformation in addressing complex life sciences industry challenges.

By leveraging advanced technologies and strategic thinking, Marlabs enabled the company to overcome obstacles, streamline processes, and ultimately deliver more COVID test kits to those in need.

This work demonstrated the value of Marlabs’ expertise in digital transformation and commitment to driving innovation and leadership in the industry.

Impressed with Marlabs’ ability to deliver effective solutions, the pharmaceutical giant entrusted Marlabs with additional projects, including:

• Intelligent material request planning
• Further opportunities to digitize and consolidate global databases
• AI-enabled social distancing initiatives in the workplace to navigate a post-COVID-19 world
• “Data democratization” – providing access to data and analytics tools for self-service insights

Impact

Marlabs’ digital transformation efforts in 2020 resulted in significant improvements to the pharmaceutical giant's production processes and supply chain management:

• Release time per batch was reduced by 23.5 hours
• Automated, AI-enhanced capabilities replaced time-consuming and error-prone manual data extraction, analysis, and reporting
• Deeper, more timely insights enabled better identification and resolution of manufacturing issues
• ML-powered scenario planning improved materials allocation and reduced supply chain risk
• Increased availability of diagnostic kits to meet global demand