How the Edge Puck Solves Multi-Vendor Instrument Connectivity in GMP Environments
With the amount of data captured throughout GMP environments in 2025, automating manual touch points is a necessity to avoid data silos and enable real-time decision making across manufacturing operations.
But when the best automations are more complex and costly to set up and maintain than just having it done manually by lab techs…
It becomes a spreadsheet decision.
Even if manual operation puts facilities at increased contamination, compliance, and data integrity risks.
It's why in the past 30 years, nothing has changed with how pharma manufacturers get critical instrument data to LIMS, MES, or QMS.
Manufacturers with hundreds or even thousands of analytical scientific instruments in production facilities have relied on the same pen and paper processes and manual massaging of their data to prepare it for their backend systems.
Early on, as we spoke with some of the largest pharma manufacturers, a pattern emerged.
They didn't want revolutionary change… They wanted evolutionary improvement.
It became clear that if we wanted to deliver automation that would make sense for manufacturers, we would need to build around their infrastructure and add zero complexity to their existing workflows, while making our systems flexible, for seamless scaling as operational needs change.
The Multi-Vendor Connectivity Challenge
One of the biggest obstacles in GMP environments was enabling connectivity across all instruments, including legacy devices with limited networking capabilities.
Some instruments were 20+ years old with serial connections; others were modern devices with built-in WiFi.
We tried a few hardware solutions that got us 70-80% of the way there, but there was no gateway or computer on the market that met all the requirements we identified.
We needed a device that could:
- Go into a cleanroom and function as a powerful computer
- Be completely self-contained and meet cleanroom standards for sanitization
- Serve as a purpose-built processor to connect instruments to our backend infrastructure
- Use pre-built device agents that communicate in the native protocols of each scientific instrument
- Continuously capture sample data, whether instruments use Modbus, TCP/IP, or other communication protocols
- Handle all of the idiosyncrasies of each individual instrument to extract and store data on the IoT Edge
That's how Phizzle's Edge Puck was born.
A computer packaged inside of a gateway that enables pharma manufacturers to:
Achieve Versatile Connectivity
Allow lab techs to push a cart with an APC or a microbial air sampler and take samples throughout a facility while maintaining connectivity
Solve connectivity challenges in cramped cleanroom spaces where conventional gateways are too large or impractical to install
Connect Multi-Vendor Critical Instruments to Digital Systems
Enable remote operation of APCs, microbial samplers, and analytical instruments from one vendor-agnostic UI, eliminating unnecessary cleanroom entries and reducing contamination risk.
Store Data on the IoT Edge
Critical instrument data and workflows are stored on the Edge, enabling the same continuous monitoring and batch sampling workflows even when the network goes down and syncing once the connection is restored.
The Result
Climet 1070 connected to the Phizzle Edge Puck via Ethernet
Our customers were able to achieve more consistent connectivity, reduce deviation reports by over 60%, and maintain audit readiness with built-in compliance protocols.
The evolutionary improvement the industry desperately needed has been realized, but that's just the beginning.
With a reliable, consistent source of clean data, new possibilities emerge: AI/ML integrations, more precise analytics-based decision making, and constant process improvement as lab techs no longer needed to perform manual data collection, formatting, and entry procedures.
If you want to see how this is possible in your manufacturing facility, schedule a demo and we'll show you our solution that enables paperless GMP workflows.