Pharmaceutical products must comply with strict regulations before they can enter the market. Part of this procedure involves making sure that storage conditions ensure maximum safety, efficacy, and quality of medications. By leveraging a robotic process automation solution (RPA), BearingPoint helped Boehringer Ingelheim to increase accuracy and minimize the risk of human error in determining the medications' storage requirements.
Medications must comply with strict regulations to safely enter the market at the imposed quality standards. Each drug, material, or substance must be stored in very specific conditions. This requires consideration of temperature, packaging, pH value, and potentially hazardous substances before storage.
Boehringer Ingelheim, a key player in the pharmaceutical industry, aimed to improve their material storage verification process, which relied on manual data input. With each new variable that needed to be integrated into the process, the effort to perform the verification increased.
Realizing the potential of cutting-edge technologies, Boehringer Ingelheim decided to leverage RPA to automize and standardize the material verification process and optimize their storage management.
BearingPoint gathered data from each manual step involved in the process by using UiPath’s Task Capture® product. A Process Definition Document was created, with a detailed As-Is and To-Be process description. BearingPoint then transferred the current manual methodology into a master file template, which could be adjusted easily whenever a change occurred. The template also provided integrated and consistent data for a bot to read.
The development approach, incorporating possible exceptions, was detailed in the Solution Design Document, which was used for developing the bot. Finally, BearingPoint replicated the data from the visual chart workflow into a software-based one using the UiPath Studio® platform.
Boehringer Ingelheim now has a more efficient material verification process, with an automated execution and the lowest risk of human errors.
Any changes to conditions are easily integrated into the master template without affecting the bot’s logic. This offers the material managers flexibility and the opportunity to adapt quickly to changes, while the data remains accurate and consistent.
Boehringer Ingelheim’s decision-making process is now even faster and more precise, maintaining its pharmaceutical products’ renowned high quality and compliance.
Boehringer Ingelheim is one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, and the largest private one, with net sales of €19bn. in 2019. It is a research-driven company with the main goal of improving the health and quality of life of humans and animals.
