Novartis partners with Amazon to boost manufacturing efficiency

Novartis will work with Amazon’s cloud-computing unit, Amazon Web Services, to make the manufacturing and delivery of new medicines more efficient.

A significant part of the multi-year partnership will involve “insight centers” that will allow better forecasting and tracking of production lines, detection of manufacturing bottlenecks and making recommendations for adjustments to improve accuracy.

Novartis data scientists will be able to use the centralized data to experiment with new optimization models to help ramp up the production of innovative, personalized treatments. The drugmaker will also be able to utilize AWS IoT services to improve visual inspections of manufacturing sites by generating images that can be analyzed using computer vision algorithms to monitor for risks to manufacturing production, such as unplanned downtime or delayed orders.

Last March, AWS and Volkswagen announced a similar collaboration aimed at transforming automotive manufacturing.

The financial terms of Novartis Amazon deal were not disclosed.

Read the press release