The implementation of PAT tools in pharmaceutical manufacturing has shown great advantages and applications from development to routine production, covering process understanding, scale-up support, troubleshooting, minimizing process variability and enhancing the control strategy or for real-time release of the product. This goal can only be achieved by clearly understanding the manufacturing process and by implementing the suitable technology for manufacturing and for process control. Each unit operation brings challenges that need to be assessed to prevent compromising the quality of the final product. NIR spectroscopy, as one of the major PAT tools, has attracted a lot of attention from the pharmaceutical industry since it can analyze bulk solids without previous treatment, therefore reducing or eliminating wet chemistry analysis. Three cases are presented on the real PAT applications during process development. One case considers the blending monitoring by means of a hybrid PLS model generated with data collected at different manufacture scales. Second case tackles the challenges of process development related to blending and tableting. The third case describes the monitoring of the moisture trajectories during spray granulation. PAT enables a lean evaluation of the product quality, better understanding and supports process transfer. NIR proved to be a versatile and valuable tool for the pharmaceutical development and manufacturing.