Interview with Riccardo Picca, Senior Director, Digital Transformation & Business Excellence, Drug Product Division – Thermo Fisher Scientific
The pharmaceutical sector is paying the price for years of digital lag, but competitive pressure and new customer demands are changing the rules of the game. Riccardo Picca from Thermo Fisher Scientific shares an insider’s perspective on how a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant is transforming in the age of artificial intelligence.
In the pharmaceutical sector, digital transformation is no longer an option, but an essential condition for sustaining long-term growth and profitability.
This is the view of Riccardo Picca, Senior Director Digital Transformation & Business Excellence, Drug Product Division at Thermo Fisher Scientific. With a strong background in Operations and industrial strategy, he currently works at Thermo Fisher Scientific, one of the world’s leading contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs) for pharmaceuticals.
Interviewed for the “factoryvoice” column, Picca shares a 360-degree perspective on why—and how—the sector is finally accelerating its shift toward digitalization.
A journey that started a long time ago
Before joining Thermo Fisher Scientific in December 2024, Riccardo Picca led digital transformation and business excellence initiatives in complex industrial environments, including Sandvik, a Swedish multinational with approximately €10 billion in revenue, where he drove the digital transformation and operational excellence of several manufacturing sites.
In parallel, he joined the board of MIMA, a technical committee sponsored by Microsoft and Roland Berger, with the aim of building a community of knowledge around digitalization in manufacturing across Europe and the Middle East.
“We are involved both in assessing the digital maturity of the companies that apply to join this community, and in sharing best practices, organizing plant visits, and creating training sessions on the issues that can be solved through digitalization in Operations.”
From these experiences—cross-sector yet always focused on manufacturing—emerges an “agnostic” view of digital applied to Operations, which Riccardo Picca brings today to Thermo Fisher Scientific, in a division of approximately €3 billion that manages 16 plants worldwide and produces pharmaceutical products.
Why the pharmaceutical industry can no longer afford to delay
The pharmaceutical sector has traditionally been considered more conservative than other industrial fields when it comes to digital innovation, due to strict regulatory constraints and the need to ensure product safety. Yet today, something is changing profoundly. Riccardo Picca identifies three major drivers.
1. Traditional levers are no longer enough
Traditional levers—automation, process engineering, and continuous improvement—are reaching their structural limits.
In a context where the demand for medicines exceeds supply, driven by population aging and the global expansion of access to healthcare, productivity must be sought elsewhere. As Riccardo Picca explains, productivity always has two dimensions:
“Productivity has two dimensions: increasing capacity and reducing costs. Both are becoming increasingly difficult to achieve with traditional tools.
For this reason, a new one must be activated: digitalization.”
2. Competitive pressure
The second driver is competition: rivals are investing, and those who fail to keep pace risk being pushed out of the market. The numbers are clear: in the past, IT and digital spending in pharmaceutical companies was around 0.5% of revenue; today, to remain competitive, it is about 4%.
“To stay competitive, investments will need to reach up to 7% of revenue,” Riccardo Picca explains. “Digital transformation requires significant investment, not only in technology but also in skills.”
3. The relevance of the market
The third driver concerns how Big Pharma perceives their CDMO partners. Life science industry research shows that over the past five years, buying factors related to digitalization have increased in importance by around 150%.
Riccardo Picca’s message is direct: “In the future, a non-digitalized CDMO—both internally and in its interaction with customers—will no longer be perceived as a strategic partner.”
Where are investments being made?
The areas of digital intervention at Thermo Fisher Scientific are multiple and interconnected, and span the entire value chain.
OEE, scheduling, and predictive maintenance
The starting point is the improvement of Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) in production lines, both continuous (vial and syringe filling) and discrete (tablets and blisters). Advanced digital systems enable prescriptive and predictive analysis of losses: setup, changeovers, unplanned maintenance, and quality rejects.
“This frees up capacity and reduces costs, because it is cheaper to keep the lines running,” explains Riccardo Picca.
Alongside this, production scheduling optimization plays a key role: in pharmaceutical production campaigns, numerous format and product changeovers fragment the flow; optimizing batch sequencing means recovering valuable hours.
On the maintenance side, spectral analysis of vibrations on rotating machinery makes it possible to predict component life cycles, reducing costs and unplanned downtime.
Quality Management System and AI agents
In the pharmaceutical world, any deviation from expected processes triggers a “deviation”: a long, document-heavy, and highly procedural workflow. A process that Riccardo Picca has chosen as a testing ground for generative artificial intelligence.
“We are developing solutions with an orchestrator that coordinates multiple sub-agents to manage deviation management throughout its entire lifecycle: from deviation authoring, to root cause definition, to solution development, to verifying that the implemented solution is effective, all the way to the closure of the deviation itself.”
Paperless: from batch records to laboratories
Each production batch today is accompanied by a paper batch record of around 1,000 pages, stored for years in secure physical archives. Digitalization does not simply mean creating PDFs: “It means automatically capturing data, using it to enrich the batch record, avoiding errors and reducing both the manual effort of writing and that of the reviewer—and this also leads to a reduction in deviations and complaints,” explains Riccardo Picca.
The same principle applies to quality control laboratories, where test results can be automatically captured to speed up batch release and, consequently, release to the customer and the monetization of production.
Energy management, warehouse operations, and working capital
The picture is completed by systems based on operations research and AI to optimize the energy consumption of production lines, combining production data, weather forecasts, and the characteristics of the product being processed, as well as inventory management through virtual warehouses.
The latter goes hand in hand with reducing batch time-to-release: the faster the product is released, the sooner the company gets paid, optimizing the entire order-to-cash cycle.
The real challenges: compliance, data, and skills
Compliance as a structural constraint
The pharmaceutical sector is subject to GMP regulations that require constant human oversight over any production process. This means that artificial intelligence systems, however sophisticated, cannot operate autonomously on production lines. “There must always be human review and decision-making,” explains Riccardo Picca: in the pharmaceutical world, humans in the loop are not a design choice, but a necessary regulatory requirement.
The data problem
A crucial technical challenge concerns data quality and structure. Many pharmaceutical companies have not invested in building a standardized data layer that normalizes and contextualizes data coming from different machines and production lines: without this infrastructure, digital solutions retrieve data directly from equipment, with significant scalability limitations.
For Riccardo Picca, building this layer does not bring immediate productivity gains,
“but it is a strongly enabling factor for development that is not tactical, but strategic. It is one of the major challenges: investing in the creation of a modern tech stack that goes through structured, standardized, and contextualized data management.”
Change starts with people
Perhaps the most underestimated challenge is the human one. The technology exists, and people no longer oppose digital innovation on ideological grounds. The real bottleneck is skills: the pharmaceutical sector, which in the past did not invest heavily in this area, must now quickly close the gap through internal training, recruiting, and the use of external partners.
But the starting point, Riccardo Picca warns, is never technology:
“You have to start from the business need and understand what the right lever is: it may not be digital, it could be a continuous improvement activity or a process redesign. Only after that do you choose the technology, not the other way around. The biggest issue is adoption and change management: not so much convincing people, but giving them the tools to be able to do it.”
A model for the industry
The experience of Thermo Fisher Scientific, as told by Riccardo Picca, offers a clear snapshot of what it means to lead digital transformation in a complex sector such as pharmaceuticals: not chasing technological trends, but methodically building an enabling infrastructure made of data, skills, and culture, capable of sustaining profitable growth over time.
In a market where digital maturity determines the choice of partners, digital is no longer a competitive advantage. It is an entry requirement. It is the present.