Project background and initiation

In mid-2018, Clariba's innovation department was commissioned to propose an innovative solution to a specific business need that had emerged at Almirall: automating the generation of reports resulting from drug production quality processes.

Until then, these reports had been generated manually and, although this process guaranteed high levels of veracity and reliability in the reported data, the amount of verifications that had to be carried out before producing the final output was very significant.

Broadly speaking, our innovation experts had to define an initial scenario that would ensure similar quality and reliability standards, but that would drastically reduce reporting times by fully automating all controls – since these were manual processes that intrinsically provided very little value to Almirall – and without severely impacting the workflow of the department's technicians.

Defining the approach and prototyping

Initially, a first “Design Thinking” plan was carried out where, through multiple joint sessions, all the variables associated with the proposed scenario were exposed.

From this collaboration, an initial approach emerged, defining the entire technological stack needed to undertake the transformation, as well as the structure of logical sub-processes that would integrate the solution.

The prototype that emerged in this stage was delivered to the Almirall quality department for an exhaustive evaluation and valuable feedback on how well the solution matched their requirements.

Designing a refined and replicable solution

Based on all the data collected from the initial quality assurance sessions, a second “Design Thinking” plan was carried out to further improve the proposed solution.

This refined solution was again delivered to the business for testing and evaluation. Almirall identified that the value proposal matched the requirements closely enough to commission a complete project.

The flexibility and open communication present in both stages between Clariba and Almirall was a key enabler for the swift and successful development of the project.

Project development and addition of new functionality

During the development of the project, additional features were added to the solution such as multi-device capacity, concurrent execution sessions, customization of results, export of results in multiple formats, data model for audits, security measures and controls during the execution of analysis, modern and efficient user interface, integration with other existing corporate tools, and modularity to facilitate the evolution of the platform in case of regulatory changes, among others.

Finally, thanks to the sophisticated technological stack designed by our architects, the deployment to Almirall’s environment was carried out without any unforeseen obstacles.

Post-launch - the benefits of the live solution to Almirall’s team

Since the implementation of the solution to the production environment, users in Almirall’s quality department benefit from the significant advantages offered by the new Clariba platform, with highlights including:

• Very significant decrease in the time to obtain results.
  Users can now spend more time analyzing final data and detecting deviations or anomalies rather than preparing data, creating plots, or generating controls, among other tasks. Processes that might previously have taken a week to complete can now be carried out automatically in just a few minutes.

• Absolute control in each of the stages of automation.
  Thanks to the data model developed by Clariba, users now have full visibility of all automated actions, with records of each action stored historically, thus facilitating the control and audit of interactions, and even the detection of possible degradation in the service related to the performance of the platform, peak hours of launching processes, etc.

Here we can see a general illustration of the interaction process – in a simplified version – within the context of the automation platform, as well as a generic example of one of the outputs produced:

This case study demonstrates once again the flexible service offered by Clariba and, in particular, our innovation department. Our deployment of cutting-edge technology alongside imaginative and disruptive thinking allows us to provide sophisticated solutions to the most complex business needs, while still maintaining tight delivery timescales and control of budgets.