Novartis and Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, have formed a multi-year strategic collaboration for pharmaceutical manufacturing, supply chain, and delivery operations using AWS’s portfolio of cloud services. Novartis says that the enterprise-wide data and analytics platform is expected to form the foundation for custom solutions powered by AWS artificial intelligence and machine-learning services to help drive agility, innovation, and cost efficiencies across Novartis global business processes and systems.

The collaboration will use Novartis Insight Centers, which provide real-time visibility across its network of manufacturing operations and distribution centers. Building on the success of its trial operations center SENSE, these “Insight Centers” can enable manufacturing and planning teams to better forecast and track production lines, detect potential bottlenecks, and then make adjustment recommendations to improve accuracy. Using AWS, Novartis can collect inventory, quality, and production data across its network and apply AWS Internet of Things (IoT), analytics, and machine-learning services to gain greater visibility and help drive efficiencies. By centralizing this data, Novartis data scientists can also experiment with new optimization models to help ramp up the production of innovative, personalized treatments that are more complex to make.

In addition, Novartis plans to use AWS IoT services to augment and improve visual inspections of its manufacturing sites by generating images that can be analyzed using computer vision algorithms to monitor for risks to manufacturing production, such as unplanned downtime or delayed orders. With this real-time data, Novartis says it can be better equipped to make data-based decisions in product distribution and production.

Source: Amazon