Pharmaceutical multinational company

THE CLIENT 

Multinational pharmaceutical company - Europe 

The cooperation on digitally supported services started in 2019 in one of the customer’s  manufacturing facilities in Europe. The site of the first contract had multiple water rooms generating purified water with some equipment supplied by Veolia Water Technologies.  
 

THE CHALLENGE 

As many pharmaceutical companies, this client had an internal program to future-proof their production and improve the quality of their products. They wanted to gain efficiency by using the latest technologies, data analysis and digital twin technology, to enhance the performance, reliability and quality of their sites, while reducing the total cost of ownership. 

Drivers on a local level included: 

• Active risk management and increased reliability. 
• Enhanced system performance and quality. 
• Reduction in manpower for monitoring. 
• Increased transparency. 
• Proactive and predictive asset management. 
• Cost savings and cost avoidance. 

Drivers on a corporate, global level, included: 

• Benchmarking across sites globally. 
• Sharing lessons learnt from best to worst performing sites.
• Time savings supported by prevented troubleshooting support from headquarters. 
   

THE PROJECT SCOPE 

To demonstrate the added value of Hubgrade, a pragmatic approach was chosen with the client: two central pieces of site equipment, two Orions previously supplied by Veolia Water Technologies, were connected to Hubgrade for a six month trial. During this time the added value was quantified together with the client and fed into a cost-benefit analysis.

THE SOLUTION

Thanks to Hubgrade, experts from Veolia Water Technologies proactively monitored the equipment, verifying the performance and giving recommendations to avoid deteriorations in the performance. Whenever an alarm occurred, they provided support on the root cause and correctional actions. Every quarter, a site visit was completed to discuss the recommendations with insight from the data and to clarify any questions.  

After finishing the six month trial, a yearly service contract was signed for this site and discussions are ongoing to extend the scope to the distribution system and other non-Veolia equipment. Additionally, a global framework agreement has been signed and Hubgrade is being implemented on a global scale.

CLIENT BENEFITS 

Time savings for technicians and senior process engineers were gained from reduced: 

• Equipment checks.
• Manual data logging.  
• Document searching. 
• Performance reviews. 
• Report preparation.  

Increased transparency of documents and orders:

• Quick and easy access to a digital library where all technical, operational and commercial documentation is saved.
• Transparent overview of all orders. 
• Easy re-ordering process for parts.

Physical assurance visits to complement digital services and to discuss optimizations:

• Face-to-face exchanges and inspections.
• Monthly operational reporting including performance feedback and optimization recommendations.