Data-Driven Pharma — Why Technology Alone Doesn't Fix the Shop Floor

In this episode, Florian Seidl, Business Unit Manager for Industrial Informatics at cts Group, sits down with Florian Werner, Principal Consultant at Xenium, to discuss what it actually takes to turn fragmented shop floor data into usable, scalable information in pharmaceutical manufacturing. The conversation starts with what both see in reality when they walk into a pharma production site: package-unit driven organizations where every line comes from a different vendor, data lives in isolated PLCs with inconsistent naming, and the focus is on keeping production running — not on data strategy. From there, they work through the entire arc of a data-driven transformation: why a unified namespace based on ISA-95 matters, how to structure a project from strategy through rollout, and why the most critical phase — change management and user adoption — is consistently underestimated. A recurring theme throughout the conversation is trust: trust on the shop floor from operators who have worked with the same system for 15 years, trust from management who needs clear risk assessment and budget planning, trust from IT who needs scoping transparency, and trust from OT who operates in 10-year lifecycle windows with validated systems. Both speakers share concrete examples of implementations that failed because change management was skipped, and how "front runner sites" and working demos build the credibility needed for enterprise-wide adoption. The episode also covers the practical architecture of an industrial data fabric in pharma: standardized message brokering between MES and OT systems, data harmonization across 50+ devices with different naming conventions, DQ/P system environments for GxP-compliant validation, and why the platform becomes an enabler for use cases that don't exist yet — including AI initiatives that require harmonized data in one place. The conversation closes with both looking ahead to joint conversations at Pharma Manufacturing Europe in Berlin.