ITOM and ITSM in Pharma 4.0

The Pharma 4.0 industry has to deal with many challenges in an environment marked by high legislative pressure on the sector, a highly competitive market, and a strong dependence on IT assets in all its business processes.  

ITSM in the pharmaceutical industry is the best way to control all available technological assets, both IT and OT, and know their impact on the various business processes. With this knowledge about assets and their relationships, along with good operations management, companies in the regulated sector will be better prepared to overcome all the obstacles and difficulties their business sector faces.  

What is ITSM? 

IT Service Management or ITSM (Information Technology Service Management) is a management system that aims to integrate all business IT assets (people, technology, and processes) for a more efficient operation of its business processes.

In the pharmaceutical sector, it is important to have control over all technological assets to optimize each performed process. Having a system to manage all IT resources allows for greater control over their impact on daily tasks and processes. But why not integrate the OT asset layer? Several pharmaceutical companies are coexisting IT and OT processes on an ITSM platform, giving them a broader view of business impacts while facilitating single-point management for employees.

What are the benefits of ITSM?

ITSM centralizes and optimizes IT-related processes within the company. It is a management approach that aims to convert handled data into useful knowledge to apply improvements across various business processes.

The main advantages brought by ITSM are:

• Service continuity: With efficient IT service management, the company will have greater reliability and confidence in its infrastructure, reducing downtime and ensuring business continuity.
• Reduction of management costs: Using ITSM tools allows for adjusting management costs by having a global and real-time view of all available IT assets, avoiding unused software licenses, unnecessary support contracts, obsolete or inefficient IT components, and many other actions that reduce costs.
• Improvement in decision-making: A pharma company must be agile and precise when making decisions to overcome challenges and leverage market opportunities and trends. With ITSM, it can carry out agile IT service management that provides the necessary information to make more precise decisions faster.
• Better products and services for patients: ITSM guarantees a high level of product quality and patient care, resulting in a higher degree of satisfaction. The best practices proposed by ITSM in IT asset management focus on improving customer experience.
• Increase in worker productivity: ITSM provides IT managers and company workers with tools and mechanisms that facilitate their work regarding information technologies, thus increasing performance and productivity.

What is ITOM?

IT Operations Management or ITOM (IT Operations Management) is the process for knowing and supervising the status and operation of all IT infrastructure components, whether physical (servers or hardware equipment), virtual (software), or personnel (workers and operators).

A pharmaceutical company must have an agile and robust technological infrastructure to guarantee correct operation and a high level of security at all times. Having efficient and precise management of all IT-related operations guarantees execution at optimal levels.

ITOM is responsible for performing all monitoring and control tasks for the company's infrastructure, such as network and service management, cloud management, or continuity management.

What are the benefits of ITOM?

IT operations management in the pharmaceutical industry is an indispensable process to provide sector companies with adequate response capacity to resolve any incident related to their IT assets quickly and effectively. The same applies to OT assets and their relationship with the production chain, enabling incident resolution efficiently without causing a major impact on the business.

The main advantages brought by ITOM are:

• Predict problems: Monitoring IT assets allows detecting and predicting anomalous behavior that may indicate a problem. Thanks to this proactive way of acting, service availability can be increased, solving problems or incidents before they occur. With ITOM, superior device health and performance are guaranteed, detecting productivity losses, inappropriate behaviors, inefficient processes, and other issues related to their operation.
• Minimize impact of incidents on patients: ITOM provides greater reliability and security in company processes, eliminating or reducing the impact any problem or incident might have on patients.
• Accelerate resolution process: With precise control and a constant monitoring system, any incident has a faster response time. If a severe problem occurs that interrupts technological device or software operation, operations management reduces downtime, minimizing the severe impact such situations cause in the company.
• Reduce costs: ITOM is directly related to cost reduction as it decreases maintenance expenses, repairs, and investments. It maintains real-time control over all technological infrastructure, guaranteeing optimal operation that reduces required repairs, shortens downtime, extends asset lifecycle, and offers other benefits that reduce company costs.

ITOM and ITSM for IT asset management

The Pharma 4.0 industry needs mature management of its IT resources, so implementing two asset management areas such as ITSM with ITOM is the best way to control an increasingly complex and sophisticated infrastructure.

ITOM and ITSM are complementary management solutions. While ITOM visualizes changes occurring in IT assets, ITSM displays these changes and their impact on business processes. In this way, a much more agile and efficient system is achieved when resolving any IT-related problem.

Companies in the regulated sector need to improve service quality, reduce risks, decrease IT resource downtime, and gain operational efficiency to compete in today's market.

ITSM and ITOM are presented as an optimal IT asset management system that meets the current demand of pharmaceutical companies, which are highly dependent on their technological resources.

 AMBIT BST

At AMBIT we have been experts for over 15 years in the development of IT strategies and solutions for your company. We are consultants and integrators across multiple domains, and if you want to learn more about the solutions we can offer you, do not hesitate to contact us.