Measure during manufacturing. Understand what makes quality vary. Control it. This is PAT — Process Analytical Technology.
Who we are
PAT-INDUSTRY is an integrator of process analytical technologies. Nine measurement families that require no destructive sampling, carried by the partners who develop them. Their quality makes the choice possible, our independence makes it credible.
Measurement is one of the pillars of our approach. We carry all of it, alongside your teams. From your first thoughts to validation and registration, then throughout the life of the PAT: maintenance and model updates as materials shift. Our network of experts.
What is PAT?
Process Analytical Technology — a system for designing, analysing and controlling manufacturing through measurements made during the process, on the critical quality and performance attributes of incoming materials, in-process materials and the processes themselves, with the goal of ensuring final product quality.
Measurements in-line / on-line / at-line / off-line: what are the differences?
What PAT lets you do
Who for
Pharma · Drug substance (API) · Biopharma and biotech · Chemicals and polymers · Cosmetics · Agriculture and food · Anaerobic digestion
Four situations bring people here
You have already tried, and it did not hold
Often the hardware is sound; the rest is missing. What to do with an instrument that has fallen out of use.
Your process varies, and you do not know why
A diagnosis first, not an instrument. Sometimes there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
You are being asked to prove it is under control
The approach counts as much as the measurement. What that involves.
You are moving from batch to continuous
In continuous manufacturing there is no longer a batch to sample and release. The measurement architecture is designed with the process.
How we do it
In four phases: Structure, Prove, Deploy, Sustain.
Structure
Turning a problem into a measurable question, and costing it.
Deliverable: a written diagnosis.
Why the “Prove” phase decides everything
Rather than asserting that it is NIR or RAMAN, we test the candidate technologies against your problem, in your real conditions. The proof of concept says whether one of them holds, and which.
We run those trials preferably at pilot scale or directly on the process, wherever access allows, and not on a bench. A model built in the laboratory has to be rebuilt at deployment; a model built in real conditions is already usable. Why that changes a project’s timeline.
Our portfolio covers nine measurement families, different and complementary: we compare them, then keep the one that best answers your problem, taking your existing equipment and its constraints into account. Each partner describes its own technology with the precision of someone who has mastered it; the comparison between several measurement physics happens elsewhere, and that is the reason this portfolio exists. How a proof of concept runs.
Do you have an in-line pH probe? That’s already PAT
An operation run to a fixed time because the worst batch needed it. A result that lands half an hour after the decision it was meant to inform. A blend stopped at the setpoint, with no way of knowing it was uniform well before. Those are the situations this addresses. The variables this covers.
An in-line pH probe or temperature sensor is already part of PAT
A pH or temperature reading taken in situ and in real time is already a process measurement. The subject begins there, not at the spectrometer. What makes it harder afterwards is wanting several variables at once, or a variable no simple sensor gives. That is when NIR, RAMAN, tomography and the rest arrive.
As for the industry: anything that turns a raw material into a finished product is concerned. Pharma and bioproduction carry the most formalised regulatory frame. But food, chemicals, cosmetics and biomass recovery ask exactly the same questions, in a different vocabulary.
Two pages hold the essentials: what makes an in-line measurement hold, and the technology comparison.
Where do you want to start?
Measure
One variable per page, and the technologies that answer it.
Understand
What makes quality vary.
Control
Monitor, intervene, release.
Industries
Your industry, operation by operation.
Describe your process. We will tell you whether the measurement is possible, and which one.
Forty-five minutes are enough: whether a non-destructive technology can answer your question, which one deserves a trial, and what the installation would require on your side.