Visium adds hands-on engineering depth for pharmaceutical manufacturing

Visium’s team is growing and in June this year we added hands-on engineering depth for our product that is deployed to pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Niklas Nyholm joined our product team to deepen the answer to the question he has been trying to answer his entire career: How to build products that become something people actually use while they are busy?!

With almost 20 years of experience, Niklas has built Saas products across various startups and scaleups in financial management, document management, and HR technology. He spent two years as the VP of Engineering at Smallpdf. Across his entire career, he has moved repeatedly between building the products and leading teams. This practice gives him a unique advantage in building expertise, products, and teams.

Now he has chosen Pharmaceutical manufacturing, and Visium.

Niklas joined us as Founding Full-Stack Engineer on our Pharmaceutical manufacturing product team. Someone who has led engineering functions has chosen to be hands-on at the point where the decisions are still open, which is the stage that determines what the product turns out to be.

He joined Visium at a point where the industry's difficulty has moved. Pharmaceutical manufacturers are being asked to bring AI into quality processes that are audited, documented, and consequential. They are not starting from nothing, either. They run established systems they have already invested in, so anything new has to earn a place alongside what is already there.

The model, in other words, is rarely the hard part. The hard part is whether an operator halfway through a shift, or a QA manager preparing for an inspection, changes what they do because of it.

What the deviation report does not say

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Ask where the hours go in a deviation investigation, and a large share of the answer is reconstruction of the deviation details. The report arrives missing the information that mattered, and the QA manager has to interview people days later to recover it.

Niklas explains that from the floor rather than from the quality desk.

"They have a factory to run. They need to record something in the system, so they record it, and they don't have time to write everything down. That's the practical real-world answer."

This represents a workload problem, and it changes what a useful system has to do. Products built on the assumption that the record is complete inherit exactly the same gap.
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Why Visium, why now?

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Beyond the desire to help people, what drew him to our product is that he can help shape it based on the challenges our clients face on a daily basis.

"There's undefined best practice for AI use from a UX and UI perspective. There are big product questions. How do we even use these things? Not the technical question, but is it a chatbot? Is it an assistant button? How do you interact with it at all? It's interesting to be there for that."

For a pharmaceutical manufacturer, that question decides adoption. A system nobody reaches for mid-shift produces no value, however capable it is. It is also close to how Visium approaches the work: the objective is a product that holds up inside a real operation, under audit, in the hands of people who did not ask for a new tool.
Building software people reach for

Niklas's career has repeatedly started in the same place: a working environment under time pressure, and a product that has to earn its place in it. He is now applying that to the question that will decide whether AI reaches pharmaceutical manufacturing at scale.

Beyond work, you can find him hiking the beautiful Swiss mountains, because nature gives him a lot of inspiration. Since moving from Finland to Switzerland being outdoors is one of his favorite hobbies.

If you are interested in learning more about Devin, reach out to Niklas, or drop us a message.