HDI vs digital maturity assessments
Pharma and biotech companies already have good tools for rating digital maturity. HDI answers a different question. This page explains the difference and when each one is useful.
What do digital maturity assessments measure?
They rate how far a site's technology and data practices have developed, on a fixed scale. Two are common in our sector:
- The BioPhorum Digital Plant Maturity Model (DPMM) rates manufacturing capabilities on five levels, from a paper-based, pre-digital plant to an adaptive plant that corrects itself. Teams use it to see where a plant stands and to plan the next level.
- The ISPE Pharma 4.0™ maturity assessment adapts the Industrie 4.0 Maturity Index developed at RWTH Aachen to pharma. It looks at four elements, resources, information systems, organisation and processes, and culture, plus two enablers, digital maturity and data integrity by design.
Both answer the question "how advanced is our technology, and what comes next?".
What does HDI measure instead?
HDI measures how much the operation depends on specific people: who has to be present, who has to remember, who has to chase. It asks what happens in concrete situations, such as the key person being away or a deviation being opened, and scores the answers against fixed behavioural descriptions. The result is a 0–100 score per layer and overall, a view by process, and the hours per month the operation spends compensating for that dependency.
How do they compare?
| Digital maturity assessments | HDI | |
|---|---|---|
| Question | How advanced is our technology? | Where does work depend on specific people, and what does it cost? |
| Unit | Capabilities of a site or company | Processes and the people who carry them |
| Method | Rating of capabilities against maturity levels | Behavioural questions and a workshop scored against fixed anchors |
| Result | A maturity level and a roadmap to the next one | A 0–100 score, hours lost per month, the processes to fix first |
| Time | Usually a multi-week programme | About 15 minutes for the screening; a half-day workshop for the audit |
Can a digitally mature site still score high on HDI?
Yes. A plant with connected systems can still have one engineer who knows how to recover a failed batch, or one QA specialist who leads every investigation. Systems record the work; HDI shows whether the work still waits for one person. The opposite also happens: a mostly paper-based site can have low dependency because its procedures are clear and several people can do each step.
Which one should we use?
Use a maturity assessment to plan technology investment across a site. Use HDI to find where the operation leans on individuals and which processes to automate or document first, so that the investment goes where it removes a bottleneck. The two work well together: the maturity level says where you are, HDI says where people fill the gaps.