Improvements in Safety and Quality Accelerated by Eli Lilly’s Digital Transformation Initiatives

ARC Advisory Group has been tracking the digital transformation initiatives of companies by conducting surveys and analyses for the last 5-7 years. All this information has been collated, and the Top 25 global industrial digital transformation leaders, across multiple industries and geographies, have been identified. ARC’s Industrial Digital Transformation Top 25 report highlights companies that are successfully integrating digital technology into all areas of business, fundamentally changing the way they operate and deliver value to their customers. They share a common thread of leveraging digital technologies to transform business capabilities and outcomes, giving them a competitive advantage during challenging global circumstances.

The global business landscape has gone through immense turbulence and uncertainty in the last two years. The pandemic catalyzed companies to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives and adapt to the constantly changing demands with agility. It is evident that only companies that deployed digital transformation initiatives were able to thrive and survive. Today, digital transformation has emerged as the focal point of all business-related conversations and is expediting the ability for physical and organizational boundaries to be broken to engage a real-time workforce, connect teams, and drive collaboration.  While some shifted their digital transformation efforts during the pandemic, all had some level of prior preparation and have an eye toward the future.

For this research, digital transformation has been defined as: “The integration of digital technology into all areas of business, fundamentally changing the way companies operate and deliver value to customers. The organization is typically charged to innovate and improve across multiple dimensions such as: digital/disruptive technologies, culture and leadership, operational agility, workforce engagement, customer experience, environmental, social and governance, and competitive performance.”

This is the sixth in a series of blogs on the leaders in the digital transformation space.

Eli Lilly

Eli Lilly’s mission is centered around making medicines that make life better for people around the world, and to do that with safety first and quality. They see the digital plant as a way to accelerate improvements. For example, the company reduces ergonomic risks by using robotics for lifting boxes and ensures quality through real-time analytics rather than after-the-fact testing. These technologies also drive cost efficiencies.

The digital plant and technologies that go along with digital transformation, such as robotics, data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and the industrial Internet of things (IIoT), promise greater efficiency. Eli Lilly has been advancing in applying these technologies to its pharmaceutical manufacturing organization, which the company claims has enabled it to make better medicines. The company established a role dedicated to corporate global reliability, which involves helping silos to communicate, making them more comfortable, not always leading but at least interacting.

Next Step

ARC will continue its research in all areas related to digital transformation to learn more about what is working – and what isn’t – as companies pursue their unique digital transformation activities. The Industrial Digital Transformation Top 25 report will be published annually. With this being the first issue, your feedback is very important to investigate new approaches and measures to adjust our methodology, identify successful digital transformation initiatives, and help the industry as a whole digitally transform. This report is the fruition of an idea that matured over several years, spurred on by the many experiences with end users, their challenges, and research by ARC team members. To download the final report, please click here.