A solution based on Mulesoft to integrate all the digital systems of the new Faes Farma factory.
A scalable and sustainable solution for the complete digitization of Faes Farma
The company
Faes Farma is an international pharmaceutical laboratory, present in our homes for more than 90 years. With 1,700 employees and a turnover of close to €500 million, Faes Farma is defined by the unwavering pursuit of excellence and the pursuit of the highest pharmacological quality.
In order to expand its industrial capacity, Faes Farma has invested 170 million euros in the construction of a new production plant in Derio (Bizkaia), allowing it to significantly increase sales in the domestic market, and especially in the international market. The construction of this new plant has also enabled the company to implement new manufacturing technologies, in line with the criteria of the pharmaceutical industry 4.0, which gives it a clear competitive advantage in the market.
The challenges
The project presents some challenges that it is important to manage very well from the beginning:
- Integrate all systems involved in record time
- Manage multiple systems with different vendors/partners
- Use different integration technologies depending on the target system
- Match the implementation of interfaces with the implementation of each of the systems involved (constant changes in integration requirements).
- Systems and processes subject to validation standards
- High availability requirement
The project
The pharmaceutical sector, long before medicines, moves data. It is a sector that is subject to exhaustive quality controls and very demanding regulatory compliance, which affects not only the final product, but also all the systems involved in the marketing and manufacturing processes (MES, LIMS, EBR, ERP, CRM, etc.).
The start-up of a new plant, with such a high level of technology and automation, multiplies the number of systems to be managed and the volume of data to be handled. This fact, together with the criticality of the systems and the regulatory requirements, highlights the need to rethink the existing integration model: it is not sustainable to continue with the traditional scenario of point-to-point integration.
With this goal in mind, we started a project for the implementation of the Mulesoft platform as a global integration strategy within Faes Farma, accompanying the internal IT team in the process of adopting the tool. To carry it out, we chose a first use case on which to start working, and with which to address the integrations required by the different systems involved in the new production process of the new plant, including ERP, WMS, MES, EBR and palletizing.
The strategy applied
The project is approached as an incremental project, in which we start by defining an MVP whose main objective is to deploy the Mulesoft platform and implement the first integration between SAP and the weighing system. This first integration is used to deploy the environment, and to establish good practices and standardized patterns for successive integrations. Thus, for example, through API Governance, rules are defined to guarantee the quality and uniformity of the APIs, authentication policies are configured in the API Manager to secure access and ensure the quality of service, and monitoring and alert mechanisms are established for the APIs built.
The second phase proposes a new integration between SAP and the palletizing system. In this case, we take advantage of the implementation of the new interfaces, to extract and refactor elements shared with the previous design, and that we understand can be reusable also in future projects. As a result of this second phase, fragments are obtained , which allow the reuse of the data model in other applications, and functions, which encapsulate some common business logics.
In the last phase, the integration between SAP and the WMS is addressed, taking advantage of the applications previously published in the Mulesoft Exchange, which significantly reduces development times. During this phase we also take advantage of the prototyping capabilities offered by the tool, to publish interfaces that simulate the integration between the systems, and that allow each supplier to work independently without being conditioned by the state of progress of the other systems or suppliers. This is critical to avoid dependencies, blockages and bottlenecks in the correct progress of the project.
At the same time, Faes Farma is starting the deployment of other systems with very different integration needs: the implementation of CRM and the creation of a Datalake with analytics from BI solutions. In line with the new strategy of globalization and standardization of interfaces, the integrations required by these projects are also managed within Mulesoft. In the case of the CRM, the supplier reuses and extends the integration APIs with SAP to bring information to the CRM, and in the case of the datalake creation project, other ETL services are dispensed with, replacing them with an integration built in Mulesoft, which is responsible for moving millions of records.
The results
With this project, Faes Farma has made progress in its digitalization strategy and its commitment to innovation:
- Reduce time-to-market to address projects with your stakeholders: industrial environments, wholesalers, pharmacies, suppliers, public organizations, etc.
- Save implementation and maintenance costs by taking advantage of the capabilities offered by the platform.
- Have a governance model to manage all APIs, ensuring the robustness, standardization and security of any integration.
- Ensure high availability through monitoring mechanisms, alert systems and redundancy of connections.
- Eliminate third party dependencies and captive knowledge
Beyond operational aspects, for PKF Attest, the real success of the project is to have managed to transfer to Faes Farma the virtues of this approach, and that the IT department has become its main prescriber: they have completely changed their approach to integrations, making Mulesoft the key piece on which to pivot.
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