Reinventing Life Sciences & Healthcare is about digital meeting physical
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Life Sciences & Healthcare organizations are under unprecedented pressure. Against a backdrop of a growing and ageing population, and with care therapies, drugs and diagnostics becoming more complex and expensive, these industries must deliver personalized, cost-effective, and compliant solutions faster than ever.

At the same time, they face global disruption from geopolitical shifts, sustainability mandates, and increasing competition – both from digital-native new entrants and generic alternatives purchased by increasingly savvy consumers.

The sector has a dual challenge: increasing patient value, and bringing down costs – all within a heavily regulated and safety-conscious environment.

At Capgemini, we believe there are three critical ways for life sciences and healthcare organizations to meet these challenges: infusing operations with digital technology, upgrading legacy engineering systems, and building globally agile and resilient operations.

All three revolve around a central idea: transforming the digital and physical worlds together.

1. Infuse digital into the physical world

Life sciences companies have long dealt with sophisticated physical systems – complex manufacturing equipment, labs, and regulated medical devices. But much is also legacy-driven. Its many siloed, often paper-based systems create costs and hurdles, resulting in slower and inefficient go-to-market of critical drugs, devices and therapies.

Using digital technologies (AI, software, IoT, Digital twin etc) at scale can deliver improved ways of operating, faster time to market, and lower costs, whilst also delivering sustainability through reduced waste and energy.

Take connected factories and digital twins. These allow for real-time monitoring, simulation, and optimization of physical processes. Pharmaceutical companies can test and refine manufacturing changes virtually before deploying them in the real world, ensuring compliance and accelerating time to market.

Projects abound across life sciences which illustrate such transformation. An example is CALIPSO, a €20 million+ bioproduction initiative involving Sanofi, Capgemini, and others, which used micro-sensors, AI, and digital twins to enhance predictive control of bioproduction processes.

Digital also enables people to work together more efficiently. Data platforms and cloud – increasingly with built in supportive AI agents – provide spaces for scientists to collaborate across drug development silos – creating a digital feedback loop that can significantly reduce R&D cycles.

2. Upgrade core engineering

Many life sciences companies are constrained by aging infrastructure and fragmented legacy systems. These block innovation and cost-efficient operations.

While individual upgrades are fine, the key to unlocking transformation at scale is to streamline and standardize these systems, allowing new technologies to be easily integrated, whether digital or physical.

Predictive maintenance on the shop floor is one such example. Capgemini delivered a predictive maintenance solution for a large global biopharma organization which reduced risk of human error by 80%, improving delivery and yield, whilst boosting asset and capacity utilization by 20%. But it was only possible because the correct data foundation had first been put in place to modernize legacy systems.

Standardization can also underpin more radical changes. Some legacy systems are so outdated, and local skills so hard to find, that companies decide to lift the entire function into a more optimized and smarter ecosystem.

This approach is often seen with activities like product sustenance. For global medical OEM leaders, it is a challenge to maintain and update their large portfolios of Class I, II or III regulated medical products, including lines that have been discontinued but still need maintaining. Our experience shows that a standardized engineering platform across the portfolio of products yields large-scale optimization efficiencies in managing and maintaining these regulated products. This standardized approach also allows such activities to be delivered from anywhere in the world – enabling easy outsourcing of cost centers.

Here again, the magic happens when digital solutions are applied to physical engineering – but this time in a whole new context, on the other side of the world.

3. Build agile, resilient operations around the world

Life Sciences companies are grappling with the fact that legacy, monolithic operations are less and less viable in this globalized yet geopolitically fragile world.

The modern world needs agility – allowing it to rapidly deploy products and services across regions, adapt to changing local regulations, and scale engineering operations quickly. This is vital for quickly getting products to the widest possible market, especially in uncertain environments.

One way to achieve agility is through smaller, distributed manufacturing sites and engineering hubs, strategically placed around the globe where they can be close to customers, suppliers, or talent pools, or where transport emissions are minimized. Such operations require an ecosystem of partners, and require digital solutions to manage, similar to those developed to manage global supply chains.

But agility isn’t just geographic, it’s operational. This is not just about physical manufacturing facilities, but centers of excellence which unblock barriers to innovation and production efficiency. Regulatory compliance, commissioning, qualification, verification, or process heavy activities are classic candidates. Employing dedicated specialist teams to deliver these functions, not only saves money but allows organizations to be faster and more agile.

Capgemini has pioneered a concept called Engineering Factories. These ‘Factories’ redefine traditional outsourcing. Each is designed around a specific engineering domain and business goals, such as delivering products at a specific cost or weight; or managing specific operations such as the supply chain, MES, sustainable product design; or delivering capabilities like compliance, validation, or quality assurance. Each factory combines a team of specialists and engineers with operational and digital expertise. They are transversal, working across industries to bring the best of all worlds synthesized together.

Consider a large-scale Manufacturing Execution System (MES) deployment. Normally, rolling out MES solutions across plants would be time-consuming, resource heavy, and associated with high costs and high stakes. In our experience, a focused MES Factory helps clients standardize processes and achieve faster results. For example, one global pharmaceutical company implementing a global MES solution saw a 75% reduction in quality review time and an 80% reduction in deviations.

A similar example is our Commissioning, Qualification and Validation Factory, based out of centers in Portugal and Morocco, serving highly regulated manufacturing sites focusing on compliance, and complex global regulations with a standardized and efficient approach. Another is the Intelligent Testing Factory, based out of India, that provides full lifecycle product management and intelligent testing for global medical device clients, including a human sample testing lab, ensuring global readiness and regulatory alignment.

Such a factory approach creates a centralized hub that can deploy new capabilities in a standardized, agile way, which is often accessed via a front office on the client site. The result is a more resilient, adaptive, cost-effective engineering organization.

Built for both worlds

Of course, these areas all overlap. A successful life sciences and healthcare organization could digitize its entire value chain to optimize digital and physical processes. This could provide a foundation to quickly upgrade operations or move business functions to centers of excellence that take advantage of high tech setups, cost reduction and global talent pools.

As the world changes around us, what sets successful organizations apart is their ability to operate fluently in both the digital and physical worlds. They will embed intelligence into every part of the product and production lifecycle, whilst shifting from isolated physical systems to joined up digital-physical ecosystems. They will quickly take advantage of cost savings and innovation opportunities, whether by optimizing operations at home, or delivering them elsewhere to take advantage of the benefits of smarter factory setups or favorable business and talent environments around the world.

All of this requires agile physical operations with a digital underpinning.