At the 2024 edition of the Pharma Manufacturing World Summit held earlier this month in Boston, we spoke with Michael Andrews, the Global Product Manager | SmartFactory Rx® of Applied Materials, to talk about an important issue facing pharmaceutical manufacturers and how the experience of the semiconductor industry can help: Alarm Management.

In most manufacturing facilities, an alert, an alarm, a warning, or a notice is going off somewhere every few seconds. Different machines inform different operators of different data. Very few manufacturers have a clear overview of what is being flagged everywhere at any one time, and the human operators who work with their systems day in and day out quickly learn to ignore some alarms while perhaps putting too much time and attention into monitoring others. Would it not be to everyone’s advantage to have an overarching system that brings all alarms up to the same level of visibility and then helps human operators recognize which ones to focus on at any one time? As luck would have it, the ever-evolving semiconductor manufacturing space has already created a system that operates in an even more fast-paced and exacting manufacturing environment than the one most pharmaceutical companies operate in, and Applied Materials is helping taking the hard-won lessons of Alarm Management from that industry and bringing it to the tightly regulated, patient-focused, quality-centric pharmaceutical manufacturing space. For every pharmaceutical executive who worries things are getting missed in their manufacturing facilities, give this episode a listen!