Amazon Web Services has agreed to provide its portfolio of cloud services across Novartis’ pharmaceutical manufacturing, supply chain, and delivery operations, aiming “to help drive agility, innovation, and cost efficiencies across Novartis global business processes and systems,” the latter company announced.
Spokespersons from both companies told us that teams have already started working on the integration of Amazon’s services in Novartis’ infrastructure, noting as well that the first demos are expected to be live by the end of 2019.
The multi-year agreement will also see Amazon and Novartis work together to create ‘Insight Centers’, a platform providing real-time data about the company’s manufacturing operations and distribution centers.
More specifically, Insight Centers is expected to enable manufacturing and planning teams to better forecast and track production lines, detect potential bottlenecks and then make adjustment recommendations to improve accuracy.
By using Amazon’s services, Novartis stated that it will collect inventory, quality, and production data across its network and apply analytics and machine learning services in order to gain greater visibility and help drive efficiencies.
According to the pharmaceutical company, this will also enable the company’s data scientists to experiment with new optimization models that will help ramp up the production of complex personalized treatments.
Additionally, Novartis stated that it plans to use Amazon’s Internet of Things (IoT) services to increase and improve visual inspections of its manufacturing sites, by generating images that can be analyzed by vision algorithms.
This method is expected to enable the company to monitor for risks in the manufacturing production, such as unplanned downtime or delayed orders.
Novartis’ chief digital officer, Bertrand Bodson, commented that manufacturing is a ‘great starting place’ to utilize Amazon’s services, adding that the company is ‘keen to explore’ where else the technologies can be applied.