Cognizant join the Pharma Industry Awards 2022 as Impact Ambassadors with a keen commitment to digitisation. The Impact Ambassador programme highlights thought leadership from companies supporting the sector in Ireland. BusinessRiver, organisers of the Awards, caught up with Trevor Marshall, senior director consulting with Cognizant, to understand how they see the future of the Irish pharma sector both from a local and global perspective.
What is Cognizant’s vision for the pharma/biopharma sector?
Cognizant’s vision is to support our customers on their journey on bringing lifesaving medicines to market quicker than ever before, and to provide information to the right client teams to improve their manufacturing facilities and global supply chains. Our teams work with clients, transforming their business, operating and technology models for the digital era.
What are the big trends of the next five years?
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We are getting closer to digitising and integrating more and more of the systems that support manufacturing business processes not only within a site but across the supply chain. This will lead to more predictive and adaptive plant operations. We expect that a digital thread of the data created on the product lifecycle from R&D to manufacturing will become a reality for more companies which will serve to improve time to market for new products and improve the process knowledge base for these products. We will see novel drug modalities where the industry will continue to need to transform how we scale and bring these new products to market.
How is Ireland viewed internationally across the global sector?
Ireland is viewed favourably across the global sector, evidenced by the continued investment in the pharma/biopharma sector. Ireland is seen to possess the skills and experience to build and run innovative life science manufacturing. Some of the most forward-thinking bulk manufacturing facilities in our customers’ networks are located in Ireland where they continue to invest in new processes and digital technologies to improve the manufacturing processes.
How does Ireland feature as part of your global strategy?
Cognizant Health Sciences practice works across all areas of the industry from the drug development and clinical trials space to scale up and commercial manufacturing. Our global life science manufacturing team is centred in Ireland with three offices in Cork, Dublin and Waterford and over 20 offices globally supporting client life science manufacturing hubs. Ireland will continue to be part of our global life science growth strategy.
What does Cognizant seek to achieve as a member of the Irish pharmachem community?
We wish to continue adding to Irelands knowledge economy where our teams in Ireland work with customers globally in the execution of some of the most innovative projects worldwide, both from a consultancy and project execution perspective. We seek to create the leaders of tomorrow in our domain by providing a working environment where they can learn and excel. We wish to be the pharmachems’ digital partner of choice.
What is your own strategy around innovation and progressive development – across your services?
With the advent of newer digital technologies as part of the fourth industrial revolution we have continued to partner with new technology companies who are looking to disrupt and provide value to our industry, everything from the large hyperscalers to the niche. With our domain expertise in life science we are using these technologies to put data and insights into the hands of those that need it, to either automate, accelerate, or aid manual tasks in our customers’ business processes.
How does this strategy help you achieve industry objectives?
The life science industry is going through its own revolution where the R&D pipelines of new novel therapies is leading to more targeted medicines to smaller populations. With this comes the challenge of accelerating new production introductions to market while also improving the manufacturability of these products and allowing a previously monolithic operational and information technology footprint to become more agile and capable of taking on industry challenges. Our strategy is to ensure where technology can be an advantage that we work with our clients on their transformational journey.
How do you see yourself as leaders the industry?
Cognizant works with the top 30 pharma/biopharma companies worldwide. We support our customers in the conceptual engineering, project execution/start-up of greenfield and brownfield facilities as well as the continued engineering and IT support across all facets of our customers global and local initiatives. We offer scale and expertise to the industry across the full manufacturing technology stack from industrial automation systems, manufacturing operation systems to ERP and Internet of Things (IOT) platforms with life science industry domain expertise.
The Pharma Industry Awards took place at the Dublin Royal Convention Centre on Thursday, 10th of November 2022, and attracted more than 150 submissions from world’s leading pharmaceutical companies. For more information on the awards visit www.pharmaawards.ie.
Pharma Industry Awards Organiser, BusinessRiver partner with global thought leaders to highlight the importance of collaboration and growth within the sector. If you would like to partner with us contact kevin@businessriver.com.