Sartorius Stedim Biotech and Siemens Collaborate on Automation

The Siemens technology group and Sartorius Stedim Biotech (SSB) have agreed on long-term cooperation in the area of automation, the companies announced on June 12, 2018. This agreement provides that Sartorius Stedim Biotech will preferably use Siemens automation technologies in products and solutions that SSB offers its customers for the development and manufacture of biopharmaceuticals.

SSB has already been using established Siemens automation solutions for process control in its large-scale bioreactor and filtration systems. To standardize its own product portfolio even further, SSB has decided to introduce a new, configurable automation system for its range of systems. SSB systems will be successively equipped with Siemens automated solutions in the coming months and can thus be integrated into process control systems, such as Siemens’ Simatic PCS 7 and Simatic Batch. 

“By introducing this new automation platform and further standardizing our products, we are making it easy for our customers to integrate their systems into higher-level automation solutions, such as SCADA [supervisory control and data acquisition], MES [manufacturing execution systems] or ERP [enterprise resource planning]. At the same time, we are enabling them to achieve easier scalability of processes ranging from lab scale to commercial-scale production,” explained Oscar-Werner Reif, chief technology officer at SSB, in the press release. 

Siemens and SSB also introduced the first product based on the new automation platform: the FlexAct module, a flexible module that is used to control many different process steps within biopharmaceutical production.

Source: SSB