Making the Leap from R&D to Manufacturing

The success of industrial R&D activities has a direct impact on a company’s long-term commercial profitability. Today, a variety of market forces, including the drive for growth, the search for new ideas and innovative products, and the increasingly competitive pressures of the global economy, have made R&D activities more important than ever from a strategic perspective. Figure 1. Integrated workflows and the use of scalable automation and control technology helps to support performance improvements during R&D efforts, product development, scaleup and process optimization The need to streamline the process of moving from industrial R&D through demonstration-scale operations to full-scale manufacturing is a basic business requirement. To develop and manufacture products in the most cost-effective way, companies need a platform that will enable the smooth and consistent transfer of the proven product designs to full-scale manufacturing plants around the globe. Applying state-of-the-art control technology and integrated information-management procedures throughout the discovery, research, process-development and optimization steps will help laboratory processes to successfully make that critical leap. Streamlining…