An engineer at a major pharmaceutical company put this way in a recent phone conversation.
“If I can define what the functionality of a module is in a standard way, then I can let anybody go out and create their own module that conforms to that standard. That helps me communicate horizontally and vertically. Pack Tags is a first step, but modular programming is a second step. Modular programming helps in the area of validation because now I don’t have to validate a PID loop or other device. They’re considered commercial off the shelf because they’re used in multiple applications and are not custom pieces of code. It lets us rely on the supplier’s validation and documentation practices and good software programming practices. As long as we audit the suppliers to see that they have those controls in place, we can rely on their documentation for validation.”
Watch for this trend to continue picking up momentum.
