Hermes Arzneimittel
Fulfilling pharma regulatory requirements and beyond
We use sensor data coming from production processes to give us greater insight into our manufacturing operations and produce high-quality medication products for our customers
Implement industry-leading data infrastructure and stay ahead of the competition
50% increase
in speed of system integrations
Trend analysis
and process verification now possible for all products
Founded in 1907, the family enterprise Hermes Arzneimittel manufactures and supplies high-quality self-medication products. The company serves more than 13,000 customers in over 60 countries and has two divisions: Hermes OTC and Hermes Pharma. Its key brands
include doc, Biolectra, Anti Brumm, and Cevitt. Hermes’ passion is developing safe, effective, user-friendly products that restore and sustain health.
To ensure public safety, regulatory bodies in Germany and other parts of Europe stipulate continuous monitoring (“Ongoing Process Verification” or OPV) of drug manufacturing processes and require companies to document critical product attributes and process parameters. Hermes was meeting those requirements via Excel spreadsheets and point-to-point integrations, but that approach was inflexible and labour-intensive. It also prevented the IT department from responding rapidly to requests from manufacturing units for operational data and analysis.
Collaborating with its VAR partner QuinScape GmbH, Hermes deployed Talend to integrate six different systems, each providing information from different points in the manufacturing process.
Each also featured a different data format, different interface, and unique project numbers. According to Stefan Recklingloh, IT Application Manager for Hermes, deploying Talend “transformed integration and data collection for these systems from challenging, hard-to-maintain, hand-coding jobs into repeatable, future-proof integration designs.”
“We now have a complete view of the entire production process for each batch of pharmaceuticals,” says Recklingloh. “By analysing such a comprehensive dataset, we’ll be able to find patterns in the data that can lead to increased efficiency and reduced costs.”
“Vendor-managed inventory” will also enable Hermes’ customers optimise their inventory and predict the number of needed pharmaceuticals based on all kinds of events happening in the world, such as weather or early signs of emerging epidemics. By adopting a big data strategy and collecting far more data than regulations require, Hermes is poised to implement industry-leading capabilities and stay ahead of the competition in pharmaceuticals.