What are Mediabooks?

Chiara Rolle
Marketing Intern at Sourcin SA

Arnaud Schmutz
 Sourcin CEO

Welcome to the Sourcin Blog!

I’m Chiara, the new marketing intern of Sourcin, a company operating in the knowledge management of the biopharma manufacturing operations. Today we have the chance to have a conversation with Arnaud, the founder and CEO of the company, who will help us to learn more about Sourcin and to understand its roots.

Chiara

Welcome Arnaud, and thank you for your time.

Arnaud

Hi Chiara! My pleasure.

Chiara

Let’s start by introducing Sourcin to our readers. How would you describe in just few words its main purpose?

Arnaud

Sourcin teams are endeavoring to simplify the “reading” of instructions contained in the dense documentation of biopharma process operations. The purpose is to make the information uniform to overcome language barriers. It is a standard ground for anyone to understand, retain and execute complex handling steps during manufacturing operations, Sourcin contributes to the teaching of operators.

Chiara

The biopharma sector is a very dynamic one, where the innovative technologies and production capacity increases are frequent. What are in your opinion the main key factors that are critical for the manufacturing teams to consider?

Arnaud

Innovation implies changes and each change is a challenge. Changes can be of different kinds. Personnel leaves or changes in position may create a gap in the proficiencies to operate a process. Similarly, a new production line requires a seamless knowledge transfer from Capex project team members to the operation team. Any loss of knowledge could be detrimental to the production ramp up phase or to its capacity. These examples bear the same challenge. It has a lot to do with the ability to ensure that the expertise of seasoned personnel, remains at hand for all.

Therefore, it is our experience that

  1. to permanently capture each tacit knowledge in a sharable format and
  2. the evaluation of the pool of qualified workforce is of paramount importance.
  3. The usage of digital format prevails over paper forms with the ultimate goal to fulfill the current Good Manufacturing Practice (cGMP) requirements.

Chiara

Let’s move now to the solutions provided by Sourcin and start with the Mediabooks. What are they and what needs are they aiming to meet?

Arnaud

The Mediabook is the mean to show what to do instead of reading the procedures. The Mediabooks are video based with visual highlights embedded. The duration is of 5 minutes in average, showing each elementary step, in order to easily follow and to replicate them, regardless of one’s background. They are organized in libraries to reflect accurately the process sequences.

Chiara

The Mediabooks have indeed embraced the current digital trend. What does it provide in your opinion to the training activities?

Arnaud

I will explain in focusing on the Biopharma manufacturing activities though this model is applicable to any industry sector. Let’s talk about the adoption of single-use technologies. This creates new handling techniques and is a drastic ecosystem change transforming the daily activities. The Mediabook format is a perfectly scalable solution to transfer first hand instructions to operators.

Yet, due to lack of time, resources or guidance, some trainers still use legendary approaches such as classic face-to-face teaching and read-and-sign-based learning programs. These are limiting in time and numbers of trainees to manage hence missing the benefits that remote training with Mediabooks can provide. For instance, providing a mean to learn asynchronously with a spread-out audience (time wise or location wise) irrespective of the SME and the equipment availability.

Body language works best to show technical handling steps.

Chiara

As you just said earlier, the Mediabooks are “visual”. Does it mean that there is no voiceover? And if yes, what is the reason of this choice?

Arnaud

It is common knowledge that “images speak more than a thousand word”. Video based instructions provide the first-hand visual information and thus it is easier to understand and reproduce. We deliberately kept the visual channel to only focus on the action occurring without distraction from an additional source that a voice over may create. Furthermore, it helps to overcome the language barriers, and cumbersome translations. It’s literally “I see what you mean”, pun intended of course!

Chiara

Would you like to explain briefly the main steps of a Mediabook creation?

Arnaud

Indeed! We start from the Working Instructions documents in use at our client plant. During interviews with the Subject Matter Experts – often seasoned personnel –we review each manual operations. This helps to ensure traps and hiccups are identified. The devil is in the detail, always. Then Sourcin teams prepare a “storyboard” detailing every step of the operations occurring at the plant. Next, a project team travels to the production site to capture in video the selected operations. The master video files of the daily operations are then edited and the transliteration occurs: Sourcin selects and elects the key moments to highlight graphically, making sure the deliverable conveys firsthand information to whoever will watch the Mediabook once created on the LEx platform.

Chiara

Let’s close this short but enlightened conversation by moving our attention on a really felt topic nowadays. The covid-19 pandemic has deeply changed dynamics and functioning of many industries: what did it change in the biopharma sector?

Arnaud

The past 2 years of pandemic have shown a significant increase of demand to train more personnel on new techniques at new production suites. Being the “first to market” has always been a key factor for biopharma industry yet, the supply to the populations of new vaccines has been and still is a priority. To address this situation, many new hires are required to produce swiftly a large quantity of vaccines using new processes and new technologies. Training more people and faster has been a major issue. In this light, an efficient training mode is important in order to tackle pandemic situations and Sourcin’s training model is very relevant mean to assist the biopharmaceutical industry in that regard.

Chiara

Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions.

It has been very inspiring.

Arnaud

Thanks to you.