Part 2: From Lifecycle Chaos to Connected Execution — Digital Twins in CMC
A follow-up to to the previous article, where I explored how product, regulatory, and supply chain complexity in CMC demands connected digital solutions.
The Problem
Across Consumer Health and Pharma, CMC functions operate under constant pressure to maintain compliance, accelerate time to market, and adapt to regional regulations. Yet the supporting data—on formulations, markets, SKUs, sites, and submissions—is fragmented and difficult to trace. In short, data is everywhere—but immediate trust in it is nowhere.
Where Digital Twins Fit in CMC
Digital Twins offer a structured, lifecycle-aware way to unify fragmented views across functions in New Product Development process. They allow teams to work from one version of the product’s digital state—across formulation, regulatory, labelling, and launch. In this prototype, the Paracetamol product lifecycle is modelled through four modular twins.
Each twin mirrors a core part of the CMC lifecycle—and evolves as the product does.
Digital Twins Speak the Language of the Business
Real transformation happens when architects & engineers understand how their designs align to business processes, not just infrastructure.
Too often, we chase architectures that look great in PowerPoint. We get excited by tooling, automation, or GenAI trends — and forget what the business user experiences daily.
In CMC, the questions are:
The best engineers & architects today should not be fluent in just technology. They should be fluent in context.
That’s how we reduce rework, prevent tech debt, and build trust.
Digital Twin Prototype: Built with Purpose (Not Just Tech)
AWS components used:
It’s lightweight, explainable, and business-facing — not just developer-friendly.
What This Unlocks for CMC
Digital Twins are more than visibility tools.
They enable:
And critically:
Digital twins provide the structured foundation for LLM models (possibly RAG-enabled) to answer business questions in plain English — through Agentic AI-powered assistants.
Imagine asking:
All possible because the data is connected and coherent.
The Big Picture Benefit
Today: Each team solves their slice of the process in isolation, leading to delays, misalignment, and rework. With Digital Twins: Everyone works from the same structured, versioned, and live product lifecycle model.
Next Steps
In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing the full working prototype: JSON templates, Lambda APIs, UI stubs, Sample dashboards etc
If you have any suggestions from a CMC end-user perspective or from tech perspective, please reach out — I’d love to connect.
Final Thought
Big-Picture clarity to join the dots is a competitive advantage and today the entry barrier to provide tech solutions is almost non-existent.
And I say this because although I am not a professional developer, I have managed to bring this together by combining analysis skills with the unlimited availability of low/no code toolkits today. We don’t need more impressive architectures and bigger engineering teams. We need tech solutions that are anchored in business, built with empathy, and designed for scale.
🔖 #DigitalTwin #CPG #Pharma #CMC #ProductLifecycle #ArchitectureWithPurpose #AWS #AgenticAI #InnovationExecution #BusinessDrivenTech