The importance of a Building Management System

In the pharmaceutical manufacturing environment, it is absolutely critical to manage environmental conditions. Currently, this is done either manually or with bespoke solutions that have been very expensive and intrusive. Additionally, the mechanical equipment that is currently used, requires annual maintenance and calibration. This process is very expensive and resource intensive.

While manufacturing used to rely heavily on the human factor, industry 4.0 is based on autonomous, computerized processes, utilising data and analytics for improving manufacturing processes, management decision making processes and quality assurance. It allows equipment to transfer data between them, and to be constantly connected. The machines’ ability to gather and analyze data, combined with their learning ability, creates a new and exciting environment where operations can be based on better, more informed decisions.

What is a Building Management System

A building management system (BMS) is a computer-based control system, which consists of hardware and software which is installed in traditional buildings that monitors the utilities in a building such as ventilation, lighting, power systems, fire systems, and security systems. BMS has become an essential tool for many facility managers and building owners allowing a BMS system to serve as the command and control centre for the building, with information pouring in from all parts of the building including heating, ventilation, lighting, water, security, etc and allowing reports to be pulled  remotely on current readings, switching facilities on and off based on peak times and managing the cost and consumption of electricity and water which will help during times of restrictions.

Pharma BMS can encompass all the items of the traditional BMS solutions but adds more to the needs of the pharmaceutical manufacturer, as they have extra conditions to monitor in their manufacturing environment. These other factors are conditions very relevant to pharmaceutical manufacturers and links to the quality of the end product. These are things like temperature, humidity, differential pressures, etc. If one or more of these factors are out then the manufacturer should not be running the production line in an environment not ideal for pharmaceutical manufacturing or packaging.

How can Informed Decisions help you?

Informed Decisions provide a custom-designed solution that covers Pharmaceutical companies key pain points using our private Long Range Wireless network to monitor environmental conditions as well as gather the information and display it in near real-time, all the time, for up to date analytics of each of the production line environments. With additional features such as HVAC, Utilities, Security, Generator, etc coming soon.
Making BMS more accessible and harnessing the power of analytics and data collection enables companies to make predictions and base decision on this information which in turn delivers additional value. Our solution records all the data that is then given to the clients (in terms of contract packers) or regulatory bodies to show compliance to the manufacturing standards.

Moving to a real-time analytical dashboard of all the rooms in a facility will give manufacturers the ability to pick up any issues very quickly, saving a lot in goods produced outside of a specification when this issue is picked up by the periodic inspection person. Time and wastage are kept to the absolute minimum with complete and accurate data stored for accountability for the future should there be an issue with a consumer on a product in the market.

The benefits to the building owner making use of a building management system are:

• flexibility on change of building use driving more value of the business
• increased level of comfort and time saving and increased energy efficiency
• real-time monitoring of all the rooms/environments of manufacture
• live data of each environment to save someone walking around manually testing and measuring
• dashboard view of a plant for rapid response to issues
• escalation of alerts and warnings to ensure someone is eventually advised of the situation not remedied by a lower level first responder
• analytics of not only the rooms but the effectiveness and possible imminent issues on the facilities such as HVAC
• reduction on staff who would normally monitor the rooms but can now provide other services or handle only the issues raised by the automated BMS system