The Life Sciences industry is undergoing transformative changes as personalized medicines and unique therapies are developed and brought to the marketplace. Companies are driving digital transformation efforts to move toward autonomous operations, meeting the needs of people who require these innovative therapies.

In this podcast episode, I’m joined by Emerson’s David Zhang to discuss these digitalization efforts and the important role that real-time scheduling plays in bringing these therapies to market in a timely manner.

Give the podcast a listen and visit the DeltaV Real-Time Scheduling section on Emerson.com for more information on advancing towards autonomous operations.

Transcript
Jim: Hi, everyone. I'm Jim Cahill, and this is another "Emerson Automation Experts" podcast. Today I'm joined by David Zhang to discuss DeltaV Real-Time Scheduling, or DeltaV RTS for short, and how it helps manufacturers drive improvements in their operations. DeltaV RTS was recently honored with Plant Engineering Magazine's 2025 Product of the Year Gold Award in the Automated Processes category. Welcome to the podcast, David.

David: Thanks. Thanks for having me here, Jim.

Jim: Well, I'm looking forward to our discussion. I guess to open things up, can you share some of your background with our listeners?

David: So I guess how far should I go back? Maybe 20 years ago, we started this program out of UC Berkeley. I was a Ph.D. student at the time in industrial engineering, and one of our desires was where could we apply industrial engineering to other industries? For those of you who don't know, industrial engineering is all around simulation, optimization, throughput maximization, and it's typically used for places such as airlines, semiconductors, logistics, etc. And what we saw was, Life Sciences, was actually a place where people are still using a lot of manual processes. And we thought, hey, is there something that could apply there? And the company that we founded called Bio-G was born. Fast forward to about six years ago, we were acquired by Emerson, and now we are one of Emerson's scheduling simulation platforms.

Jim: Well, that's great. We're so glad when you joined the family there. So let's get into the meat of things here. And let me ask you about BioPhorum's Digital Plant Maturity Model. I know given all the changes among manufacturers and the Life Sciences, that companies have a huge focus on assessing and advancing the digital maturity of their operations to better meet the challenges posed by all these changes. What are some of these changes and the challenges they present?

David: And I think maybe we can start talking about the Digital Plant Maturity Model. For those of your listeners who might not know what it is, it's really like a guideline to help a company assess where they are in terms of their digitalization journey. And you can really think about it from level one all the way up to level five, one being more of like a pre-digital plant, where there's a lot of paper-based processes, low-level automation, PLC-based controls. And as you move up, you'll hit things such as the level three connected plant, which means that companies usually have a lot of software already implemented, vertical integration. They'll have things such as an ERP, an MES. And then at the furthest along of the digital maturity model is what's called the adaptive plant. And the adaptive plant really is meant to be a lot ...