Everything you wanted to know about digital scheduling and capacity management

Binocs is the #1 global market leader for digital scheduling, capacity planning, and resource management in life science laboratories, particularly those of the pharmaceutical industry. Here is everything you need to know about our operations management system, and why 40% of the top Big Pharma companies use our system to optimize their laboratory operations.

How we do it: 10 ways Binocs makes life easier for labs

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1. Demand management

Binocs acts as a hub for all incoming demand by seamlessly integrating with any third party system (including LIMS, ERP, and QMS). This means that all work—not just release and stability testing but also instrument calibration, cleaning activities, employee training, meetings, and any other tasks—can be curated in one place, providing a single source of truth for everyone in the lab.

With easy-to-use business rules and workflows, planners can define operating models that automate the optimized allocation of tasks arriving from any source, ensuring that teams can immediately know what needs to be executed—and when—in order to protect their service level.

2. Operational management

Using our fully customizable services, Binocs allows labs to fully define their test methods following an established standard work model. This allows the system to factor-in variable lead times for concurrent/sequential testing, work within specific operational constraints, adhere to instrumentation requirements, and follow allocation dependencies to ensure fully quality-compliant peer-reviewing and double-checking standards. Thanks to our out-of-the-box KPIs, labs can readily review expected vs actual lead times and make adjustments to their master data accordingly.

And, to ensure the best person is always assigned to the task, Binocs defines and tracks employee training in an intuitive competence matrix. In this way, not only is each individual’s suitability to execute a service or activity logged, managers can also readily identify, at a glance, where gaps can be filled with cross-training!

3. Capacity planning

The roots of the Binocs technology are in capacity planning—it’s where the product started and it remains a central pillar of our commitment to excellence. The system seamlessly connects demand forecasts to automated operating models to provide a comprehensive preview of the expected workload, months or years in advance. This immediately allows planners to compare previews of upcoming work against the lab’s expected ability to execute based on staffing levels in any given period. Because Binocs knows who is available and competent to deliver work, where and when, it can automatically identify capacity bottlenecks and the resultant impact on service levels weeks or even months in advance.

With planners able to foresee potential capacity issues before they occur, they can use our what-if scenario analysis feature to simulate different solutions and identify the best way forward—for instance, by increasing in-house capacity or by anticipating the need to outsource analyses during peak periods. That way, last-minute firefighting on the shop floor can be kept to a minimum!

4. AI-enabled scheduling

By knowing all the incoming work requests, each team member’s training and availabilty, key instrumentation parameters, and the details of test methods and standard work, Binocs represents a digital twin of each laboratory. That means it has all the necessary information to construct an optimized schedule of work, with tasks automatically assigned to the best person for the job at the right time to maximize the likelihood of on-time delivery.

Where it once took a lab planner hours of work and careful manipulation of complex Excel spreadsheets, our AI-enhanced algorithms mean that weeks of work can be optimally scheduled (and re-scheduled) in mere seconds. Binocs represents a smart co-bot, a turbo-charged scheduling engine that takes away the complicated and repetitive task of calculating workplans, while continuing to give the human planner the final say on all allocations. Once finalized, every team member can see exactly what they need to do, when, with which key intruments, and can mark their tasks as executed in real time to ensure everyone has visibility on progress.

5. Campaign management

Although a LIMS is an indispensable asset in any modern QC laboratory, most such systems simply aren’t equipped to support lab operations between sample reception and the logging of test results. This is especially true for analyses where multiple samples can be tested in a single run—a LIMS may provide a sample runsheet, perhaps grouped by test and product type, however this is little more than a static best-guess list with no insight into the status of other (re-)tests and prioritizations.

Thanks to our zero-code integration, however, Binocs is ideally placed to seamlessly pick up the responsibilty of sample management from the LIMS when samples arrive in the lab. Combined with its status as a digital twin of the laboratory, Binocs can be set up to automatically group samples into campaigns based on any criteria defined by the lab staff themselves. Providing at-a-glance visualizations of each campaign’s fill rate and latest safe delivery date, the Campaign Manager feature allows for immediate stop-go decisions and can even be automated to launch when a minimum fill rate or maximum date are reached. Once a campaign is launched, the relevant tests are scheduled and assigned to the best individual(s) for execution, providing them with a clear and fully up-to-date list of precisely which samples to analyze and when.

6. Autologous therapy slot allocation

Binocs isn’t only about Quality Control planning—due to our unique combination of technologies, we’re also ideally placed to support production planning for cell and gene therapy (CGT) products. This is especially important for autologous therapies, where treatments are developed from time-sensitive samples collected from the patients themselves. Due to the narrow time windows involved—typically 24 to 48 hours before the tissue becomes inviable—it is critical that samples can be collected and shipped to the manufacturing site and then be processed almost immediately.

To maximize the likelihood of this being achievable, Binocs works backwards from the manufacturing site (either in-house at the developer or at a CDMO), first planning the production schedule, then identifying available manufacturing slots for processing tissue into product, and then extrapolating from that an appropriate apheresis appointment that will allow sufficient time for the sample to be collected, shipped and delivered to meet the relevant slot. In this way, Binocs significantly reduces the coordination effort required by treatment center staff and reduces the strain on patients.

7. Performance management

Information is power and a lot of information goes into making Binocs an accurate digital twin: each batch uploaded to the Demand Manager, every test execution, each sample grouped into a campaign, every record of staff training—these are all data points saved in the system. The value of those data points extends beyond the purely operational: they represent critical information that can be used to assess and improve laboratory performance and that’s why we believe they should be available and accessible to our users. 

With Binocs, labs can start tracking their performance from Day One. We offer a range of ways for users to interface with their data, from out-of-the-box KPIs that have been especially designed for laboratory operations, to customizable and interactuive Gantt charts; or from intuitive capacity reports to our catalog of off-the-shelf dashboards, everything has been created with our users in mind. This means we provide labs with the tools they need to bring their performance to the highest level and we help senior management to simplify the harmonization, reporting and enhancement of data across their entire QC network.

8. Zero-code integration

The modern laboratory is every bit as much a connected data ecosysten as it is a physical place. That’s why a key principle of the Binocs philosophy is to offer optimized interoperability with the entire network of digital laboratory systems. We have long championed agnostic integration and provided a fully RESTful API to facilitate seamless connectivity with critical sources of lab data, such as LIM systems, ERPs and QMSs.

What does this mean in practice? Well, for one thing it means that labs don’t need a dedicated IT team with hacker-level coding skills! In fact, setting up a connection with another system is pretty much as simple as plug and play, a few pointers from our Support team and work requests can be arriving from a LIMS or any other source in real time!

9. Supply chain-QC integration

Despite being a critical component of the product release pipeline—and routinely being the biggest contributor to overall end-to-end lead times—QC teams often get overlooked in S&OP meetings and are rarely afforded the opportunity to participate in supply chain planning discussions. Nevertheless, we know from long experience that optimized Quality operations have much to offer the wider organization and that better connectivity between QC and Supply Chain can make all the difference in shaving precious hours and days from E2E lead times.

That’s why we support a more joned-up approach to supply chain planning, providing systems that connect the dots and pull data together from across the pipeline to coordinate test plans based on stratified priorities. We build that interaction into our entire approach, developing maturity models to ensure that our clients strike the right balance between advancing their digital plannign capabilities and the extent of their QC-SC integration.

10. Embedded support

We’re more than a software house, we believe in providing a full service to our clients to ensure that they can get the most value out of Binocs. It’s not enough to simply replace old ways of working with a shiny digitalized analog—we’re committed to delivering intelligent laboratory digitalization. From Day One, members of our implementation team can be on site to ensure that master data and standard practices are accurately reflected in a lab’s digital twin. This is designed to help make the transition to a new way of working as easy as possible.

In the same vein, team members can immediately access our fully-online e-learning Academy that has been developed specifically to help bring users up to speed in how to get the most from the Binocs system on a practical, day-to-day level. Once everything is up and running, all team members have full access to comprehensive and clear user guidance via our online Knowledge Base, which featuring helpful articles clearly explaining every feature in detail. And our comprehensive support also extends to a dedicated team of specialists who are available to answer technical questions.

What we do: 5 Binocs value propositions in resource management

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At Binocs, we conduct a thorough business value assessment for all prospective projects, focusing on capacity planning, digital scheduling, and resource management, to ensure that we can fully deliver on client expectations and requirements in pharmaceutical laboratories. Here are five key value drivers that existing customers report as representing quantifiable operational benefits: