Emerson Briefing Note
Axendia was recently briefed by, Kristel Biehler, Vice President Life Sciences at Emerson on the company’s acquisition of Fluxa to strengthen its position in the Life Sciences industry.
Fluxa’s Process and Knowledge Management (PKM) offering aims to accelerate speed to market for new therapies by helping drug development and manufacturing organizations harness the power of collaboration and data across sites, functions, and processes.
According to Emerson, the acquisition of Fluxa’s PKM™ software will provide customers a unique solution, integrated with Emerson’s industry leading software—the DeltaV™ control system and Syncade manufacturing execution system—accelerating the development of new drug therapies.
Building on a Strong Process Control Foundation
Emerson has a significant presence in Bio-Pharma, primarily in Drug Substance manufacturing, with its DeltaV™ distributed control system (DCS).
“Emerson’s automation solutions and market leadership, combined with Fluxa’s software, automates technology transfer, giving bio-pharmaceutical companies unprecedented agility to get therapies safely to patients during this critical time,” said
Mark Bulanda, Executive President of Emerson Automation Solutions.
According to Kristel Biehler “Emerson has traditionally been strong in the drug substance segment. With strategic business endeavors like the acquisition of Fluxa, we expand our relevance, straddling more commercial manufacturing processes while reaching back into the process development space. The investment in PKM connects all of these areas to help us reach across the entire drug development pipeline.”
“Emerson is driven to improve business outcomes for the Life Sciences industry. At the core of this strategy are four customer benefits: pipeline acceleration, real time release, flexible and continuous manufacturing, and operational integrity,” said Kristel Biehler.
Playing a Bigger Role in Life Sciences
With the Fluxa acquisition, Emerson intends to play a bigger role across Bio-Pharma by supporting accelerated time to market for new therapies and helping drug development and manufacturing organizations harness the power of collaboration and data across sites, functions, and processes through PKM.
The combined solution would enable Life Sciences organizations to seamlessly translate and transfer scientific processes and workflows in the development realm into the automation language of manufacturing operational technology (OT) facilities. With Fluxa, Emerson plans to digitally transform the drug development process, enabling speed, flexible and multi-product manufacturing, and improved operational integrity.
Emerson’s automation solutions combined with Fluxa’s software, aim to automate technology transfer in one step, giving Bio-Pharmaceutical companies unprecedented agility to get therapies safely to patients during this critical time.
AspenTech Alignment Creates Additional Synergies in Life Sciences
In May, Emerson also announced the successful closing of the combination of Emerson’s industrial software businesses – OSI Inc. and its Geological Simulation Software business – with AspenTech to create a global industrial software leader (“new AspenTech”). With the close of the transaction, Emerson owns 55% of new AspenTech.
“This enables the two companies to synergize their complimentary solutions to support Life Sciences organizations from design and plan, run and release and analyze and optimize in support of Emerson’s focus to support pipeline acceleration, real time release, flexible and continuous manufacturing and operational integrity,” said Kristel Biehler.
In addition, Emerson is restructuring its Software Portfolio to drive value creation in Life Sciences via a unified approach that is:
- Best-in-class software culture
- Client value, success, and innovation focused
- Level 2 System Agnostic,
- OT / IT friendly delivery
To support this unified approach, the company is focusing on SaaS solutions including:
- Real-Time Modeling and Scheduling – Bio-G
- Process and Knowledge Management – Fluxa
- Data Fabric, OT/IT Convergence – Plantweb Optics
- Digital Twin – Mimic Simulation Software, DeltaV Simulation Cloud
- Dynamic Alarm Management – AgileOps
- SaaS SCADA – Zedi
- Asset Performance Management – AspenTech
- Process Modeling and Design – – AspenTech
- Plant Operations Management – AspenTech
In Brief
Today, Life Sciences organizations are looking for platforms that will enable them to leapfrog to get to the Right Side of the Digital Divide (See: Digital Transformation: The Business Imperative for Life-Sciences).
The ability to digitally manage the recipe development lifecycle in a fully integrated platform that enables innovation and supports ICH Q12 could be the key to Bio-Pharma digital transformation.
In addition, FDA’s Guidance on ICH Q12 will accelerate the adoption of recipe-based PLM in Bio-Pharma. (See: FDA Guidance on ICH Q12 Will Accelerate BioPharma PLM Adoption )
Emerson’s acquisition of Fluxa and AspenTech alignment creates synergies in its portfolio to drive value creation in Life Sciences via a unified approach.
With Fluxa and AspenTech, Emerson has many of the tools to help digitally transform the drug development process, enabling speed, flexible and multi-product manufacturing, and improved operational integrity.
We will continue to provide updates on Emerson’s Life Sciences offerings as they become available.
Contact research@axendia.com to schedule an Analyst Inquiry on this topic.
The opinions and analysis expressed in this post reflect the judgment of Axendia at the time of publication and are subject to change without notice. Information contained in this post is current as of publication date. Information cited is not warranted by Axendia but has been obtained through a valid research methodology. This post is not intended to endorse any company or product and should not be attributed as such.