Who knew in 2003 that Passwords would become the bane of our existence and a constant drag on productivity? We did. We also knew that there was a technology called Biometrics that enabled computers to recognize humans uniquely. We decided to build a platform that would provide services such as software logins, Approval Sign-offs, as well as other automations. These could be integrated into the manufacturing supply chain to make it efficient and, importantly, easy for users.
What we didn’t initially appreciate was the complexity of the operational design of pharmaceutical supply chain systems. After integrating a few systems, we quickly learned that these were not designed for other software systems to interact with them. We had to come up with one innovative method after another to give our software the ability to Interact with and automate user authentication when the systems seemed actually to be designed to explicitly prevent this.
As we designed solutions we learned and improved and codified our learnings into a library of tools that allow us to work with nearly any kind of software. Once we worked this out, the world of pharma supply chain went and got even more complicated. Everything went virtual. Entire systems became virtualized software running on minimalized hardware. We had to figure out how to make our integrations work inside these complex nested architectures, and also enable sophisticated networked biometric sensors to interact in these environments without sacrificing speed and accuracy.
At Integral Biometrics, we spend a lot of our time eliminating milliseconds from our processes. Blazing speed contributes to the ROI and acceptance of our products, so we spend much of our time figuring out how to strip time from our processes while maintaining superior
reliability. Everyone understands the desire to eliminate passwords from systems and processes–seems like a no brainer–now. However, we have to work out how to continue to reduce the time it takes to authenticate users while enhancing security and compliance during the documentation and production of some of the worlds most important pharmaceuticals and medical devices.
Having a background in building Internet networks and communications tools from his 10 years at AT&T, our founder, Marc Diament, built our company as a fully virtual organization starting 20 years ago. With a global market of customers it was imperative that we be able to travel and work from any location as if we were back in the office. The company was built on a backbone of cloud-based and networked infrastructure. This enabled us to hire great staff from anywhere in the world and tie them into a common work space and processes and create an organization that could enable a better work/life balance. These tools also effectively tie our customers’ global teams tightly into our workflow to enable close collaboration. As a lucky by-product, when the Covid pandemic impacted the world years later, our organization didn’t change the way we worked at all. Despite quarantines and shutdowns, we were able to continue as we always had and even improve as some of the tools for remote work got even better. Our customers came to invest even more in our products as a critical component of their operations as they saw that our organization was as reliable and stable as our products.
The factory of the future will require that the people and systems that facilitate manufacturing efficiency, quality, and compliance will have to cooperate in a symbiotic physical and virtual operating environment. The team at Integral Biometrics innovates constantly to weave Biometric identification and user authentication automation into manufacturing systems to enable efficient trust, recognition, and cooperation between humans and machines.
“At Integral we are building keys to the future of manufacturing.” — Marc Diament, Founder
