Collaboratively Planning Quality-Control Laboratories with Binocs

QC Laboratories Planning, which is what?

Today, QC labs have to be lean labs. While coping with complexity and volatile demand, QC labs are constantly asked to increase analyst and asset utilization, improve right-first-time, and decrease lead times. Binocs resource planning helps to create an optimal flow of QC lab activities by constantly balancing demand and human resource capacity.

Demand

Binocs consolidates all important sources of demand for QC labs:

• Lot release and product stability testing
• Deviation and out-of-spec investigations
• Method validations and transfers, instrument and facility qualifications and calibrations
• Regulatory activities, reagent, and standards management

Binocs uses existing business systems such as supply-chain planning (ERP) and LIMS to capture large volumes of lab demand for release and stability testing without human intervention. Other demand is entered into the Binocs user interface, or transferred from existing Excel workbooks.

Capacity

QC lab supervisors manage the availability and competences of their technicians in Binocs.

• Competencies: Who is qualified/skilled to perform chemical, microbiological or biological test methods?
• Availabilities: Who is available and when, taking into account (GMP) training, recurring meetings, management and administration, holidays, long leave periods, etc.?

In periods of peak demand, QC labs can exchange technicians and capture this in Binocs. E.g., one release team that sends an HPLC-certified technician to another release team to jump in.

Services: Standardize the way you work

QC labs perform tests for different demand channels (e.g. release and stability testing). Lab teams can easily model their test methods and define

• workload and lead-times;
• preparation, set-up and execution activities;
• campaign/batch sizes;
• instrument capacity constraints (e.g. number of runs per week).

Defining standardized work is a common approach in Lean Six Sigma projects as a result of value-stream mapping. Binocs will calculate the potential impact of your test optimizations end-to-end. So, no sub-optimizations, and full focus on the improvements that really make a difference.

Capacity Analysis: Be a know-it-all

Binocs calculates the required QC analysts and instruments based on the demand and analysis method information. Binocs reports give you insights into

• which teams can commit available time;
• which specific competencies team leaders should develop or acquire;
• instrument shortfalls;
• value-added versus non-value-added activities;
• the workload for a specific project;
• which efficiency improvements projects have the most impact;
• and many more.

Besides standard dashboards and views, Binocs uses pivot charts and tables (yes, the kind you probably know from Excel). This gives you endless possibilities to shape the reports in function of your questions.

Scenarios: The magical question, What if…?

What if we change the campaign/batch size? What if we reduce lead times or workload? What if demand volume and mix changes occur? What is the impact of new products introductions? What if we enlarge the test capacity by training new analysts? What if we add extra technicians? Binocs lets you create scenarios where you can play around and simulate your what-if questions. The return on investments of the different solutions can then be compared to help you and your management to decide on the best option.

Discover the features for laboratories in Binocs.