How Industry 4.0 is Significant in the Life Science Industry

Industry 4.0 helps the life science industry as it can reduce human effort and increase the utilization of advanced technologies.

FREMONT, CA: Industry 4.0 is a new and upcoming concept expected to revolutionize manufacturing, research, and other business operations across industries. Industry 4.0 plans to reduce human effort by factory automation using advanced hardware such as sensors and quality control equipment connected to next-generation software such as big data and blockchain, which ensures efficient operations.

Implementation of industry 4.0 is relatively low at present in the life science and pharmaceutical sector. Still, it is expected to increase significantly in the coming years due to the below advantages mentioned below:

Operation automation

Life science and pharmaceutical manufacturing requires high-quality standards and also have complicated regulations and policies. Hence automation of the manufacturing process is expected to ensure quality standards across manufacturing lines. Automated manufacturing processes use sensors to ensure the pre-set quality standards are maintained across commercially manufactured batches. Implementation of industry 4.0 automates the manufacturing process, in turn reducing the human dependency on production. This not only reduces capital investment in terms of salary and bonuses but also increases the production efficiency.

Supply chain management

The modern supply chain is analytics driven. Sensors, geo-tagging, and monitoring software help the companies monitor goods and products across the supply chain. This not only increases the efficient movement of products but also helps in time and efficiency optimization. Companies incur significant losses due to inefficient supply chain management such as delay in transit of products from one location to another or loss of products during transit. Location and product monitoring hardware and software help the company monitor, control, and track the procurement of raw materials, manufacturing, and logistics information in one centralized database in real-time.

Innovation in research

The major part of industry 4.0 is the implementation of technology and software in business operations. Life science and pharmaceutical companies use advanced technologies such as blockchain and big data for research and development. This increases the efficiency and scope of the study. For instance, using big data and blockchain technology for clinical trials helps the contract research center reach out to a broader range of target patients with wider demographics and gene types. This increases the research scope, but the data collected are stored and analyzed with the data analysis models and tools, which reduces the estimated time required for research.