Data Management for Life Sciences

Dissimilar systems, orphaned data, and limited tools to properly analyze R&D data. Sound familiar?

The Data Management team at Control Associates has been hearing this challenge among our Life Sciences customers for a decade or more. This is an enormous problem for the industry because siloed data leads to the inability to gain much needed insights from your process development activity. And that problem further leads to a slowdown of the commercialization process.

Control Associates has been working collaboratively with our customers to solve as much of that puzzle as possible and has a team of life sciences engineers on staff to work on-site at your facility. We’ve been able to successfully store all of that data in a central location in order to achieve part of the solution, that being a common database.

Further, we then use our expertise to put that data into context. The objective is to gain reliable knowledge more quickly from your ‘big data’ which contains key process parameters over the course of a batch, as well as from spectral data (from analyzers), and other multivariate data. However, there’s a lot of data and this only gets us part of the way to the ultimate goal of contextualization, meaningful dashboards, and insights.

There is a growing desire within the life sciences scientific communities to move to NoSQL database platforms that can accommodate different data structures and explore the relationships between time series, transactional, and spectral data.

Companies need the ability to access data, link it across multiple sources, and visualize it in a way that makes sense.

CAI’s capabilities, as a modern process automation company

While you may have traditionally thought of Control Associates as experts in automating manufacturing processes, we’ve been greatly expanding our capabilities in data management.

Because we come from an operations background, we understand what it takes to get the data to historians correctly and the tools required to analyze that data—from benchtop to scientist.

While there are many IT-related companies out there that are technology focused, they do not know operational information, nor how to connect the dots contextually. We consider you to be the experts in the science, while we are the experts in OT—covering everything from the plant floor through Level 3.