Manufacturing excellence with Astellas Ireland

The practices at Astellas — Just-In-Time inventory, biomass energy, rigorous operational standards — are not unique to pharmaceutical manufacturing. The principles translate directly to metals manufacturing, food manufacturing, and any process industry where materials, energy, and output quality are the key operational levers.

Just-In-Time inventory management is particularly relevant. In metals manufacturing, holding excess stock is expensive — raw material is valuable, storage space costs money, and tied-up capital is working capital that cannot be deployed elsewhere. Getting inventory management right requires visibility: knowing exactly what you have, where it is, what it is committed to, and when you need to order more. GoSmarter’s inventory tools are built around exactly this challenge.

The Astellas example of a 1.6MW wood chip biomass boiler that displaces 800,000+ litres of oil annually — with payback within a few years — illustrates an important truth about sustainability investments in manufacturing: the financial case is often stronger than sceptical finance directors expect. When carbon prices rise, when energy costs are volatile, and when customers increasingly require sustainability reporting from their suppliers, the ROI on reducing energy consumption and emissions becomes compelling.

GoSmarter’s approach to sustainability is similar: start with accurate measurement (emissions calculators, scrap rate tracking), identify the biggest opportunities for improvement, and build the business case with numbers that the finance team can check. The Astellas visit reinforced the value of this approach — seeing best practices first hand provides the motivation and the reference points to make the case for investment back home.

Ruth Kearney’s visit to Astellas reflects a broader principle in GoSmarter’s approach: understanding manufacturing from the inside, not just from a software perspective. Building AI tools that work in production environments requires genuine knowledge of what those environments look like — how decisions are made, where the data lives, and what the real constraints on adoption are.

The connections made through visits like this — with the RDI Hub, with Irish manufacturers of all sizes, with the network of organisations supporting manufacturing excellence in Ireland — are part of how GoSmarter continues to build the domain expertise that makes its tools genuinely useful rather than generically capable.