With all the buzz around Pharma 4.0 and how digital technologies will transform our industry, there still needs to be more clarity around Pharma 4.0 and what it means to implement it: Are traditional MES solutions considered digital technologies? How can we determine what are and are not Pharma 4.0 technologies?

Some very simple guidelines can help us sift through the myriad of information and opinions on this topic. At the end of the day, the reason we’re interested in Pharma 4.0, like Industry 4.0, is because it promises an order-of-magnitude productivity increase. As preceding paradigm shifts each came with a significant jump in productivity, technologies that belonged to the previous paradigm vanished, and companies that did not transform went out of business. Thus the simple way to discern if an MES technology is Pharma 4.0 is to ask, “will it drive an order-of-magnitude productivity increase in our operation?”