Digital and AI Powered Manufacturing & Supply: Delivering Faster and Safer for Patients
“Throughout my nearly three decades-long career in Sanofi, I have witnessed a seismic shift in the way our medicines are manufactured. With a relentless pursuit of innovation, we have evolved by embracing advanced technologies and integrated cutting-edge digital solutions, and we are now leading the way across the biopharmaceutical industry. By optimizing our processes using real-time data analytics, automation and artificial intelligence (AI), we can significantly improve the quality and safety of our medicines, and most importantly, ensure they can reach our patients faster.”
Ariel Bismuth, Global Head of Digital, Manufacturing and Supply, details Sanofi’s mission in transforming healthcare for patients through digital-driven manufacturing and supply capabilities, so life-changing treatments can be developed and delivered to patients more efficiently than ever before.
Embracing Digital Technologies to Revolutionize the Workplace & Transform Patient Lives
For Sanofi and in our Manufacturing and Supply function, digital transformation is no longer a buzzword, but a fundamental shift in the way we operate as an organization. Through strategic integration of digital technologies like advanced analytics, automation and AI across all aspects of our manufacturing and supply chain, we are moving beyond traditional, often siloed processes to a more connected, intelligent ecosystem.
Using advanced analytics, we are optimizing our production processes, as well as enhancing our supply chain visibility and proactively addressing potential disruptions with real-time tracking. Our digitalization efforts have strengthened our supply chain resilience, exemplified by our ability to avoid any medicines stock-out by over 10 points (OTIF)1 to achieve industry-leading performance. But most importantly, this translates to a more reliable and timely access to medications for our patients.
At Manufacturing & Supply, we are also changing the way we work. By employing digital tools, our teams can focus their efforts on high-value activities, improving efficiency and reducing errors. We have started on a journey to digitize our collaborative tools, so our teams can work more closely together and overcome any fragmentation across our sites. We're rapidly modernizing our factories by eliminating paperwork and cumbersome manual and repetitive activities. For example, we're leveraging generative AI to automate report creation across our organization, including data collection and formatting for our 3,500 annual Product Quality Reports, targeting a 70% reduction in creation time. By automating these tasks, we allow our experts to focus on what they do best: applying their knowledge and experience to solve complex challenges and continue innovating for patients.
Accelerating Manufacturing Agility and Therapy Access
To change health outcomes for millions of patients around the world, we need to develop adaptable and agile solutions that enable us to respond to evolving health challenges with unprecedented speed and efficiency. Sanofi is revolutionizing the way we deliver medicines to patients, and Manufacturing & Supply is the key enabler of this with Modulus.
Modulus is a first-of-its-kind production facility and the most advanced across the entire biopharma industry with two state-of-the-art facilities in France and Singapore. Expected to be fully operational in 2026, they will be fully powered digitally and equipped with automation and robotic technologies, so they can meet regional production needs for Europe and Asia, particularly in the event of a pandemic. Modulus is revolutionizing biomanufacturing with its unique ability to simultaneously produce up to four vaccine and biologic types, including viral, mRNA, and recombinant protein. This flexibility is powered by our plug-and-play model – much like a Lego set, where the pieces are assembled according to specific needs. This modular system allows us to integrate different technologies to flexibly manufacture products required to meet the ever-changing needs of our pipeline and the global health landscape.
For years, we imagined what a “factory of the future” will look like, but Modulus is now making that vision a reality, and I’m incredibly proud that we can better serve our patients with this revolutionary facility. It is designed to be fully AI-enabled and digitally connected, which means we can capture all data across the facility and continuously learn from it. This helps us not only to predict potential supply chain challenges, but also to rapidly adapt our manufacturing processes to meet public health demand.
Ariel Bismuth
Global Head of Digital, Manufacturing and Supply
Beyond speeding up the cycle of production, we are ensuring that we can accelerate the time to launch our new medicines. By orchestrating activities between Research & Development and Manufacturing & Supply, we facilitate knowledge sharing between teams and enable automated planning, and design of experiments for product transfer into manufacturing. Our development teams are also leveraging predictive drug stability modelling to better anticipate product behaviours, optimize development decisions and reduce timelines to submission and market launch.
Building a Workplace Culture for Digital Innovation
At Sanofi, we have embarked on a radical digital transformation, and we’re equally committed to fostering a digital-first mindset among our employees. With our Digital M&S Accelerator, we are creating a cohort of eight to 10 teams, comprised of top tech talents across a range of digital and biopharma disciplines. Working in an agile start-up culture, teams will develop products and solutions with the use of digital, data and artificial intelligence (AI) – for example, streamlining technology transfers, developing predictive simulation of drug stability and process scale-ups, and accelerating regulatory filing with generative AI – with the goal of a seamless launch of our pipeline to ultimately bring solutions to patients faster than ever.
Not only are we embedding digital technologies into our day-to-day operations in Manufacturing & Supply, but we are also committed to being the first biopharma company powered by AI at scale. As a testament to this ambition, Sanofi successfully accelerated digitalization of our laboratories and manufacturing plants that are involved in the launches of our new products in 2024 and, by 2030, we will have invested over €8 billion to modernize and expand our manufacturing capacity.
As we continue to innovate in the digital age, we have to transform and challenge the way we perform with digital tools – by democratizing our data internally, removing low added-value activities and optimizing our manufacturing processes, we can make faster, safer and smarter decisions for our patients.
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References
- Measured by on-time in-full (OTIF), a key performance indicator used in supply chain management and logistics to measure a supplier’s ability to fulfil its delivery promises.