Keeping plants running and performing at peak efficiency has its challenges, and if you use a Manufacturing Execution System (MES), you’ve no doubt struggled with the effort and change management complexity associated with installing and keeping your system up to date—especially in regulated environments.
Do any of these questions describe your challenges?
- Your number one goal is to minimize the production outages that result from life cycle activities in your IT systems—like MES.
- Provisioning the hardware and software to comply with the supported platform—how many and what size virtual machines? Which operating system (OS)? Where do you find the correct third-party components, and do they match the supported platform? Who manages what? What does IT already manage? Do you need to involve them?
- You have IT standards that don’t match your supported platform. How do you resolve this?
- How do you address a new vulnerability?
These are just a few of the challenges that indicate how complex pharmacy solutions can be—and showing why every update, change or migration requires complex installation and validation activities that can contribute to lengthy production outages.
Reducing Complexity with Containerized Systems
Approaching application deployment and configuration using modern distribution platforms minimizes the hurdles of adopting, implementing, and monitoring a modern MES. Containerization accelerates deployment and reduces the total cost of ownership through faster deployment, simplified dependency management, and improved scalability. A more powerful upgrade engine simplifies version management. And deep application and infrastructure telemetry increases availability and simplifies troubleshooting.
This approach makes something that’s difficult to manage at scale much easier. The right modern MES can reduce lifecycle management—simplifying sometimes extreme version management and interaction with stakeholders across apps, operations, and integrations.
Similar technologies and strategies used for cloud-based enterprise solutions can simplify and scale on-premises MES solutions, dramatically improving your responsibilities around hardware, software, and life cycle change management.
For example, fewer servers and simplified, supported, and flexible platform requirements nearly eliminate complicated issues around validated systems. A “low code/no code” approach to automating configuration and deployment slashes deployment time, simplifies the overall process, and makes for a significantly more robust and repeatable deployment and upgrade process.
