AWS IoT Greengrass

Novo Nordisk uses machine learning and computer vision to automate pharmaceutical manufacturing quality checks

Novo Nordisk, a Danish pharmaceutical company that supplies nearly 50 percent of the world's insulin, built an automated ML pipeline on AWS using Amazon SageMaker Pipelines to train, deploy, and monitor computer vision models on edge devices. The system automates previously manual tasks including counting drug cartridges in boxes and detecting bacterial anomalies on agar plates, using a robotic arm, camera rig, and edge inference, with results monitored via an Amazon QuickSight dashboard. The solution deploys ML models at scale to different edge devices, automates quality-assurance tasks, improves time to market, and was successfully repurposed from the cartridge-counting use case to the agar-plate anomaly detection use case with minimal changes.