Goal
Digitize 200 global manufacturing sites over 18 months, by implementing new digital tools that streamline lean manufacturing short interval management (SIM) processes.
Story
A leading global industrial automation and energy management manufacturer involves employees from shop-floor to top-floor to help implement a team collaboration tool that improves overall plant productivity by up to 5%.
Solutions
EcoStruxure Plant Advisor – Lean Meeting, a digital solution that collects all information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) relevant data for KPIs used in Lean Manufacturing SIM meetings.
Results
- 70,000 engaged users across 200 sites in < 18 months
- 4-5% average increase in overall manufacturing site performance
- 25% time reduction for data collection activities
- 33% reduction in shift handover activities
- < 4-hour on-site software deployment and configuration for new sites
- All SIM key metrics provided (i.e., safety, performance, service level, customer satisfaction, and quality)
- Historical data available from prior 12 months, as needed
Val de Reuil, France – Protecting the health of people around the world is Sanofi Pasteur’s primary focus and concern. As the world’s leading producer of vaccines to safeguard the world’s population from infectious diseases, Sanofi Pasteur is the largest company entirely dedicated to vaccines. Recently, the company produced 1.6 billion doses of vaccines to immunize more than 500 million people across the globe.
Conforming to strict quality and regulatory requirements is a constant challenge for Sanofi Pasteur. That means the company’s manufacturing operations have to maintain the highest level of control and accuracy to meet the health needs of the public with a reliable supply of vaccines.
To ensure that its production of vaccines complies with strict international regulations for quality and efficacy, the company implemented the Foxboro system from Schneider Electric to operate its facility in Val de Reuil, France.
The Importance of Quality in Vaccine Manufacturing
As the world’s largest company entirely dedicated to producing vaccines that immunize the public from more than 20 infectious diseases, Sanofi Pasteur recently expanded its manufacturing operations to fulfil the ever-growing demand for its products. The new production facility was designed as a highly advanced and rapid production operation which, in the event of a global influenza pandemic, could rapidly produce large quantities of vaccines to accommodate the high volume of anticipated demand.
The prior system was unable to manage this manufacturing requirement because the technology
was obsolete and built on a specific proprietary hardware platform that could only be maintained
by the company that developed the system.
This required Sanofi Pasteur to enter into costly service contracts with the developer in order to keep the manufacturing facility running. In addition, the proprietary system had several instability issues. Alarms were triggered erroneously, causing the production line to halt and resulting in significant downtime and lost revenues. The system experienced numerous hardware and network failures which also contributed to unacceptable downtime events. Moreover, the previous system was unable to provide electronic data reporting; instead Sanofi Pasteur had to rely on paper reports to complete production audit trails to meet various regulatory requirements.
“Because of the proprietary nature of the former system, Sanofi Pasteur was limited in the flexibility
and expandability of its manufacturing operations,” said Christian Colin, Life Sciences and Business Systems Manager at Schneider Electric. “After reviewing the manufacturing requirements that were not being met by the original system, the company began researching various technologies that could not only address Sanofi Pasteur’s requirements for today, but provide the scalability to meet expansion needs in the future.”
Because of continued production downtime, new international regulations for product quality control and increasing market demands for its vaccines worldwide, Sanofi Pasteur was forced to find a more reliable and productive solution.
