For manufacturers in the Life Sciences industry, data is critical in releasing medicines and therapeutics and in their time to market.

Edge computing plays an increasingly important role in the collaboration required between organizations to accelerate the development and manufacturing processes. It enables a safe space outside the control and asset management systems to provide data in a secure way when and where it’s needed, including up to cloud-based applications.

Emerson’s Nikki Bishop and Franz Valmonte join me to discuss innovations in DeltaV Edge 2.0 to help pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical manufacturers reduce time to market and release times for the medicines and therapeutics they deliver to the world.

Give the podcast a listen and visit the DeltaV Edge and Life Sciences sections on Emerson.com to learn more about how you can apply these solutions to improve overall performance.


Transcript
Jim: Hi, everyone. I'm Jim Cahill with another Emerson Automation Experts podcast. As technologies advance and enable automation architectures to continue to evolve to help drive greater manufacturing and production performance, the importance of edge computing devices continues to grow.

I'm joined today by Nikki Bishop and Franz Valmonte to discuss advances in the Edge in the DeltaV automation platform for manufacturers in the life sciences. Welcome, Nikki and Franz.

Franz: Hey, Jim.

Nikki: Hey, Jim, thanks for having us.

Jim: Well, thank you for joining us today. So Franz, let me start with you. Let's start with the big news. What's new in DeltaV Edge 2.0?

Franz: Well, the biggest update, Jim, is that Edge 2.0 now includes batch events and recipe execution data from DeltaV. So now we're at a point where we have most of the critical data from DeltaV because, in addition to batch, you also collect the configuration hierarchy and all the properties, the process values, the alarms and events, as well as SIS [safety instrumented system] module data. So now, with batch included, we're enabling far more use cases for Edge users who typically operate at the enterprise or cloud level.

So, for example, if you have a data analyst or a quality engineer, they're looking to extract data. They can easily get the details that they need about batch operations, like exactly when a specific batch step was executed or maybe if a deviation occurred, so something like that.

Jim: Wow, that sounds very comprehensive in the type of data that we're collecting. And Nikki, why is batch data so important in life sciences manufacturing?

Nikki: Well, in any business, time is money, but in life sciences, time is life. And so time to market means getting life-saving therapies to patients faster. And that might sound like trying to link that over to what we do with Edge data, but the faster you can get that data and the less latency you have in the process, the faster you can get those therapies to patients who need them.

So data drives the world right now, and that couldn't be truer also in life sciences. So unlocking that data with Edge is huge. I think we should have had more fanfare and celebration around Edge 2.0 with the batch data because it unlocks so much more than just data.