Driven by more stringent regulatory requirements on pharmaceutical production and the endeavour made to optimise performance of production processes, the volume of investments in pharma on the European market is expected to reach $398m (€311) in 2008.
According to Werum, its new PAS-X PHARMA V2.3 and PAS-X BIOTECH V2.2 include a number of improvements and interesting new features.
The user prompting of PAS-X PHARMA V2.3 and PAS-X BIOTECH V2.2 has been further optimised, now providing new dialogs and an up-to-date user interface that pushes ahead the idea of work centers (optimum dialog prompting for any kind of work package).
With the new PAS-X Version, users receive additional support in integrating and using mobile devices. PAS-X functions are now also available on pocket PC or PDA basis.
Both the product lines migrate to the database Oracle 10g, which offers ample enhancements as to scalability, high level of availability, and administration. Due to Real Application Cluster (RAC) and DataGuard being used as basis the fail safety of databases was enhanced considerably.
For the application of various PAS-X components, Werum now provides a single sign-on function, i.e. users have to authenticate only once to use all services and product components they are authorised to access.
In addition to the conventional method, card reader devices and biometric methods, such as fingerprints, can now be used for authentication. Employing these new technologies also makes it easier for several users to work at the same PAS-X workstation in parallel.
The PFU Package offers a whole bundle of new functions. The extensions and improvements are literally taken from and intended for real life as they are directly based on the recommendations and suggestions given by the PAS-X User Forum (PFU), the working group of PAS-X users. Among others, this package includes a number of new additional features for the creation and maintenance of recipes (Master Batch Records Management) and the associated approval workflow.
Version 2.2 of PAS-X BIOTECH obtained a standard interface to SCADA systems on OPC basis (OPC DA).
The PAS-X standard package now also includes standard interfaces to analysis tools offering comprehensive functionalities for the visualisation, evaluation, and interpretation of process data. Counted among them are tools like Discoverant by Aegis Analytical, SAP xMII (Lighthammer), or QlikView by QlikTech.