Pierre Fabre Driving Sustainable Water Management with Siemens Digital Twin Technology

Pierre Fabre is a leading French pharmaceutical and dermo-cosmetic company. The group faced increasing pressure to improve the sustainability of its water management practices without compromising operational reliability.

Managing water resources today is increasingly complex, especially under stringent regulatory constraints. Organizations face the challenge of ensuring operational transparency while maintaining the ability to respond in real time. At the same time, they must strike a delicate balance between achieving sustainability goals and keeping production running smoothly.

The traditional operational approaches at Pierre Fabre had relied heavily on static planning and reactive adjustments, lacked the agility to cope with the complex interplay of production demands, seasonal fluctuations in water availability, and strict regulatory requirements. To overcome these limitations and build a more resilient strategy, Pierre Fabre joined forces with Siemens and Institut Mines-Télécom in a research initiative centered on digital twin technology.

To overcome these challenges, success often hinges on the deployment of a calibrated digital twin. This allows for accurate short- and long-term water usage simulations and provides a clear view of how different operational decisions will play out. Alongside this, scenario-based investment analysis helps prioritize the most impactful and sustainable interventions, ensuring that both business and environmental objectives are met.

By creating a digital twin of its water management system, the company gained the ability to simulate diverse scenarios and accurately forecast consumption patterns on both daily and seasonal scales.

The results speak for themselves. Through these approaches, companies can identify strategic water-saving investments and optimize consumption in line with seasonal demand. Predictive simulation empowers decision-makers with deeper insights, enabling smarter choices that enhance both efficiency and sustainability.

Using Siemens Plant Simulation and Optimize my plant, they built a virtual model reflecting real-world parameters, enabling proactive and data-driven decision-making.

The digital twin provided two layers of value:

1. Operational simulation to test and compare various water usage strategies under real constraints.
2. Advanced forecasting thanks to incorporating seasonal data to predict future consumption and optimize investment decisions.

The early results were promising as the company identified structural improvements that could significantly reduce water consumption, enabling targeted investments that balance economic and environmental priorities.

Looking forward to the future, Pierre Fabre aims to evolve the digital twin into a fully supervised system, adjusting water use dynamically and reinforcing sustainability commitments. This use case exemplifies how digital twins drive the pharmaceutical industry toward smarter, greener production. It also underscores the importance of Siemens’ simulation expertise and academic collaboration to resolve real industrial problems.

Interested in learning more? Explore Optimize my plant today and put the predictive power of the digital twin in the hand of factory operations.