Digital Twins Help Polpharma Maintain Quality

Polpharma's API manufacturing plant in Starogard Gdański, Poland — the company's only facility producing large-scale active pharmaceutical ingredients — operates at enormous scale: 3.9 billion tablets and capsules annually, 600 tons of API, and 118 million units in liquid form exported to six continents. When equipment failed, technicians relied on phone calls to diagnose and resolve issues, a process that could stretch into hours. For a facility whose shutdowns affect global pharmaceutical supply chains, that lag time carried serious operational and compliance risk.

Polpharma partnered with Rockwell Automation to implement a digital twin and augmented reality platform built on FactoryTalk InnovationSuite, integrating PTC Vuforia Chalk AR with the ThingWorx IoT platform. The project began as an AR/IIoT pilot, replacing SCADA-only monitoring at operator stations with a system that creates digital twins of physical assets to track parameters in real time. Remote subject matter experts can now guide on-site technicians through precise, visually-anchored troubleshooting. The platform also surfaces online KPIs, predictive failure alerts, Top 10 alarm rankings, and interactive operator help for maintenance tasks. Following successful pilot results, the solution was extended to two additional Polpharma locations.

The digital twin deployment delivered measurable operational improvements across maintenance and energy management:

• 10–15% reduction in failure removal time
• 15–20% reduction in energy consumption across technical assets
• 10% decrease in maintenance time through remote support-assisted problem resolution

Beyond the numbers, the platform proved especially valuable during pandemic-era travel restrictions, when remote guidance became operationally critical rather than merely convenient. New employee onboarding improved through structured AR-based training, and the implementation timeline — despite its complexity — met key milestones as committed.

• Digital twins deliver the most immediate ROI in high-stakes manufacturing environments where unplanned downtime has downstream supply chain consequences.
• Piloting in a single facility before broader rollout allows teams to validate integrations with existing SCADA and IoT infrastructure before committing to full deployment.
• Remote support capabilities are not just efficiency tools — in regulated industries like pharmaceuticals, they can be continuity infrastructure during disruptions.
• Combining AR guidance with predictive analytics (failure forecasting, KPI dashboards) compounds the value of any single capability.
• Executive sponsorship and clear project milestones were cited as key factors in keeping a complex, multi-system implementation on schedule.