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FactoryTalk Pharma Suite now includes Electronic Batch Recording

New application helps Pharma and Biotech manufacturers to reduce cost of compliance by enabling paperless production.

Rockwell Automation announced recently that it has extended FactoryTalk Pharma Suite, a suite of software applications tailored to the needs of pharmaceutical and biotech manufacturers, with electronic batch recording (EBR). The new release comes with a graphical recipe workbench and an enhanced recipe execution client. Both are highly optimized to meet the needs of their targeted users and provide excellent usability, look and feel.


“While traditional EBR applications present an electronic version of a paper batch record to all users, FactoryTalk Pharma Suite introduces a new paradigm,” says Vladimir Preysman, Chief Strategist Rockwell Software. “Innovation and time to market are the main drivers in the Pharmaceutical Industry today, and we designed FactoryTalk Pharma Suite to support exactly that. We broke with the old ‘Paper- On-Glass’ paradigm and optimized FactoryTalk Pharma Suite for maximum productivity of every user at every step of recipe lifecycle from recipe design to execution, review and approval. This product extends our traditional strength in large-scale pharma manufacturing to biotech and is well aligned with the latest industry direction – personalized medicine.”

In FactoryTalk Pharma Suite, recipes are modeled graphically and aligned with the S88 standard. Visual tools and intelligent search mechanisms help ensure that all information required for recipe design—such as material, equipment, recipe building blocks, or process parameters—can be accessed quickly and easily.


Recipes are assembled from re-usable parameterized building blocks representing standard functions like adding material to a process or checking equipment against requirements. FactoryTalk Pharma Suite also allows recipe authors to isolate and save sections of a recipe as custom building blocks. After focused tests and reviews, these building blocks can be re-used in new recipes. This accelerates recipe design, prevents errors, and enables incremental validation, resulting in faster deployment.

“FactoryTalk Pharma Suite has been proven to be a flexible and agile MES platform that can be deployed in a short time,” says Robert Fretz, Head of Process Automation and MES of ROCHE. “Its built-in application development framework enables our engineers to install, configure and extend the system by themselves, which was one of the major decision criteria for FactoryTalk Pharma Suite when we were evaluating a material tracking and weighing system for our chemical production.”

“The recipe building blocks delivered with FactoryTalk Pharma Suite capture a wealth of domain knowledge and best practices from many successful EBR projects delivered by Rockwell Automation to pharma and biotech customers world-wide,” says René Schwarz, Product Manager. “Now, we are extending our proven path to provide an open and extensible system. We offer tools enabling IT departments and System Integrators to develop their own recipe building blocks to address their customers’ individual needs.”

The recipe execution client of FactoryTalk Pharma Suite maximizes operator efficiency by focusing on the operator’s main workflow. It has been designed for interaction via a touch-screen and a 2D barcode scanner, and provides excellent usability and ergonomics supporting the most efficient operator performance and compliance with GxP. The system guides the operator through complex processes and help ensure that all tasks are completed according to the recipe. Deviations are handled by the built-in exception management that delivers important input for review by exception.

FactoryTalk Pharma Suite is based on the state-of-the-art FactoryTalk ProductionCentre platform proven in hundreds of installations across different industries and scales of deployments. It leverages a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for cost-effective, flexible deployment and integration with business and automation systems. Its object-oriented design makes it easier and faster to build, modify, and systematically deploy applications across multiple sites.

For more information e-mail us at: info_enews@ra.rockwell.com ref: FT Pharma Suite