Digital Manufacturing Networks in the Real World

At CDMO Live 2025, a panel sponsored by Aizon explored how pharma companies are transforming external manufacturing operations through digital integration, with experts from sharing practical approaches to implementation.

The Digital Divide: Big Pharma vs Mid-Size Players

The panellists painted a stark contrast in digital maturity across the pharmaceutical manufacturing landscape. Dave O'Gara, pharmaceutical business consultant at Aizon with over 30 years experience at Novartis, outlined the current state of play.

"When you move into pharma and segregate into big pharma, they have digital strategies... When you move into the mid-range CDMOs and smaller CMOs, it's not so active," O'Gara explained, highlighting what he termed a "massive opportunity" for mid-size players.

Franziskus Kath, founder of Kath-Consulting and former VP of Emerging Technology for QA at Johnson & Johnson, confirmed this assessment: "The larger the companies, the more digital is already there... Most of them have been for the past eight to 10 years really tackling the topic."

From the CDMO perspective, Vishnu Dwadasi, Director of Life Sciences at West Monroe, described significant implementation challenges: "A lot of these companies are still very manual, so they have to move from paper to digital and then digital to eventually leveraging analytics and AI."

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