This statement is part of a collaboration in which Optimal Industrial Technologies’ director Matthew Gadsby and Ernie Hillier, principal owner at EJH Consulting, looked at how to use PAT to improve material management in flow chemistry applications.
Continuous flow chemistry applications are said to considerably shorten cycle times and costs as well as improve productivity, efficiency and throughput. Also, they enhance product quality and consistency. It is claimed that these applications can slash the downtime associated with off-line quality control and testing, plus offer real-time monitoring capabilities.
To successfully adopt flow chemistry on pharmaceutical production lines, Gadsby and Hillier recommended that manufacturers need to select a tracking solution that provides real-time control and process status visibility. One aspect to look for is the ability of a system to effectively interact with PAT and automation systems in order to leverage the insight provided by real-time in-process data.
According to both parties, this aspect is crucial for the system to respond to the prevailing process conditions and, in turn, provide timely feedback to operators and automation systems on in-flight product quality, process conditions and the movement of the product.
Elsewhere, they urged businesses to favour a PAT knowledge management system that is cost-effective and as well as easy to maintain to support operators in their daily tasks. In practice, this means selecting a platform that requires only minimal configuration, with no coding.
In addition, the authors suggested companies should consider the cost/benefit advantages of using a process technique that relies in part on mechanistic modelling together with empirical modelling versus an approach that relies on empirical modelling only.
When choosing a solution, they highlighted that businesses should consider using cost-effective software that has “adopted qualitative, empirical dynamic flow models as a backbone, rather than a more expensive and complex mechanistic flowsheet solution”.