Dematerialization of industrial pharmaceutical processes at Pileje

For me, there are several advantages to automating a process:

- The efficiency and time savings that automation gives us by parallelizing for example several actions at the same time, guaranteeing better compliance.

- An indispensable traceability in our trades — in quality of course, but also in other domains such as legal constraints of the VAT reliable audit trail.

- An equally essential objective to highlight is the notion of enterprise agility; indeed, a better reactivity of teams and processes allows us to increase agility and better respond to the different constraints that enterprises encounter.

Committing to a quality approach, beyond the intrinsic quality of the raw material used, is ensuring the identical declination of a product or service, its development and its business processes. The modeling of a key process and its reproduction upon every iteration unquestionably enhance and reinforce performance, regardless of the inherent constraints experienced by any company (such as team turnover, illnesses, vacations, increased activity, etc.) along with inevitable human errors.

Interaction and cohesion between all stakeholders constitute an essential lever for optimizing a process, representing a major advantage in terms of a deliverable’s requirements, in contrast to the multiplicity of teams and locations, which is an inevitable cause of errors and wasted time that bog down daily tasks.The immediate benefits:

• Time savings for teams and managers in the management of tasks to be carried out.
• A common language and tool for all services; each actor follows a clearly defined line where the deliverable is clearly delineated at each stage.
• Respecting your SLAs: Managing time in your processes will allow you to define realistic and traceable SLAs. Continuous optimization of automated production processes will allow you to always offer the best within your organization.
• The audit trail is a necessary constraint in order to guarantee the traceability of modifications made during the process. Archiving versions of each action in a request provides that guarantee (e.g. 21 CFR Part 11).
• Continuous improvement, at the heart of a vibrant business, allows you to return to the process all along the course of its life in order to rationalize, improve or correct its constituent steps (for example, a series of actions that were previously executed sequentially could be done in parallel in order to save time).
• Subprocesses facilitate the links between processes, guaranteeing perfect traceability between, for example, a client request and the project’s production phase

How process automation can help your BCP

A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) generally refers to those elements of an IT infrastructure that secure networks, access, etc. and make up the foundation of a BCP. Modeling and automating a business process at the heart of your enterprise allows you to protect against events that could impact your organization, such as departures, illnesses, and the absence of one or more key people.

Whether a customer request, an idea, a product opportunity, a new market or a social event — so many triggers can cause all of the company’s stakeholders to respond to a major issue, which will involve bringing together a community of expertise, harmonizing services to guarantee the creation of a product, and supporting and steering the entire organization (security, regulatory, financial, industrial, etc.).

Here, the key to success lies in the ability to dissolve the often recurring resistances between sales, marketing, R&D, administration, purchasing, transport, quality assurance, quality control, packaging, operational development, and so on.

Dissonances among business interfaces that are too often neglected are the direct consequence of projects wrapped up too quickly, of the regulatory portion not examined in time, of poor feedback and customer expectations, of unanticipated transport issues, and of the validation timeline not being respected.

Constructing (or reconstructing) a well-articulated business process with cohesion and mastery of each role makes it possible to easily carry out sometimes very complex processes, which is the key to success.Making the right decisions requires reliable incoming data and offering clients a win-win project at the fairest price with responsiveness, which undoubtedly strengthens the credibility of the company and legitimizes its performance.

How can automating your processes improve your time to market and streamline the interface between your services?

• Use a single interface for information sharing.
• Modelling a process, sharing it, having it validated by all of the departments and then bringing it to life allows the different services to work in unison.
• Concentrate on your trade without worrying about having forgotten something in the f ile, or that a team or an actor has not had time to perform this or that task.
• WorkflowGen includes a functionality allowing you (if you wish) to send automatic reminders when an actor is late performing a task; this neutral alert avoids any reproach between services.

Feedback from the teams

WorkflowGen allows teams to focus on their work and quickly visualize the set of tasks to be performed.

• Improved management for executives and more efficient decision making.
• Follow-up of simplified tasks prevents omissions and guarantees compliance with deadlines among all stakeholders.
• Optimized resource management for managers.
• The information systems team uses a simple administration tool that’s able to interface with the rest of the IS (ERP, database, file system, messaging, etc.).

Disadvantages of not automating processes

• Business processes risk reliance on the unique knowledge of few key people in the company.
• Loss of control over a process due to pressure to compete, increased activity, human error, etc.
• Delays and extensions of deadlines (vacations, illness, etc.).
• Risk of missing a step.

Stages in the management of process automation development projects

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Interview

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VALÉRIE BARDOT, Ingredient Development Manager, Ste Pileje

‍Advantys : How did your process automation project go?

Valérie BARDOT : Preparation is very important — meeting and exchanging with the trades that will play roles in the process is essential to gain the support of all the teams. It’s possible to automate one process at a time and then to interface them progressively, which gives us great flexibility in terms of managing our projects.

‍Advantys : In your experience, what’s it like to use WorkflowGen?

Valérie BARDOT : First of all, it should be noted that it’s an extremely simple tool for users that requires practically no training to use. The visualization of an actor’s tasks to be performed is centralized on the home page. The functionality to automatically restart tasks to be performed is greatly appreciated.

‍Advantys : What gains were you able to make using WorkflowGen?

Valérie BARDOT : It’s difficult to quantify the gains that we’ve made. We’ve made gains in efficiency, in management and in the standardization of our processes. Deadline management has been improved and we’re reassured by the traceability of the actions performed.

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CLOTILDE LANGLOIS, Product Development Manager, Ste Pileje

‍Advantys : Ms. Langlois, you’ve automated part of your business processes with WorkflowGen for three years now. What are some of its strong points that you can share with us?

Clotilde LANGOIS : WorkflowGen helps structure the processes we use. Interaction between trades is improved; there’s no more confusion or misunderstandings about what has been done and what remains to be done. Automatic reminders reassure the actor who initiates the request while allowing them to better manage their request. Project managers free themselves.

‍Advantys : Do you think you’ve saved time?

Clotilde LANGOIS : We’ve saved time on project management, for sure. It’s still diff icult to quantify, though.

‍Advantys : What are the gains you’ve observed?

Clotilde LANGOIS : All of the teams involved in a process have the opportunity to comment, which allows us to not forget anything during periods of high activity, and be able to deliver a compliant product. During the audits, I can present the processes that we actually use on a daily basis without worrying about any gaps between reality and what’s modeled. We’ve also noticed that this tool makes it easier for newcomers to assume their duties — the flows are perfectly identified and modeled, so they know what to do.

Advantys : To sum up?

Clotilde LANGOIS : More efficiency in our project management and a guarantee that all of the key steps are respected.

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PIERRE VANDECASTEELE, CFO – CIO, Ste Pileje

‍Advantys : In your view, what are the advantages of automating your business processes?

Pierre VANDECASTEELE : For me, there are three principal reasons to automate a process.

Efficiency and time savings that automation provides, for example by parallelizing multiple actions at the same time, guaranteeing better conformity, and obviously an indispensable traceability in our constituent trades such as quality, of course, but also in other areas like the legal constraints of the VAT Reliable Audit trail.

Another equally essential objective to highlight is the notion of enterprise agility. Better responsiveness in both teams and processes allows us to save time and to better respond to the various constraints that the company must consider.

We move faster thanks to electronic validation, especially considering a multi-site organization! This aspect is no longer reserved for “big” companies; remote work is becoming more and more part of the daily life of French companies (see the Macron ordinance on remote work, for example).

‍Advantys : In your area of activity, certification and audit constraints are important. Can you tell us a bit about them?

Pierre VANDECASTEELE : An audit involves being able to provide proof that we’re really doing what’s written, and that we’re scrupulously following the defined processes. Process automation simplifies this task, because we have to follow the processes, and as we evolve, the processes evolve.

The first advantage is reworking of a process f rom the ground up even before automating it, which forces us to examine how we work and if what we do is properly functional and optimized.

Automation is relevant when there is a real challenge in ensuring that what we need to do is done each time in the same way (compliance, etc.).