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Six Steps to Optimize the Resource Planning in Your Quality Control Lab

How lean is your QC lab? Can you easily cope with today’s complexity and volatile demand? More and more QC labs are being asked to constantly increase analyst and asset utilization, improve right-first-time, and decrease lead times. With a resource-planning tool, you create an optimal flow of the QC lab activities. Learn how to constantly balance demand and capacity in six simple steps.

Download our whitepaper - 5 principles to improve lab performance using lean lab strategies

How to optimize Resource Planning in QC lab?

Step 1: Structure demand and all sources of demand.

Demand comes from multiple sources. You should consolidate the most important sources of demand for your QC lab, such as lot release and product stability testing, deviation and out-of-spec investigations, method validations and transfers, instrument and facility qualifications or calibrations, regulatory activities, reagent and standards management, and much more. These are the most common ways of consolidating data:

  • Automatic capturing: the integration with existing business systems such as supply chain planning, ERP or LIMS applications allows the capture of a large part of the lab demand automatically. As such, demand for release and stability testing are being captured without human intervention.
  • Easy upload: Transfer the content from existing Excel workbooks.
  • Manual data entry and changes in a user interface, to further complete the full picture

Step 2: Manage your lab team capacity.

Lab supervisors also need to manage the competences and the availability of analysts and technicians. As the team manager, you have to keep track to swiftly exchange resources in periods of peak demand, and still oversee it all. You need to be able to

  • manage competences: compose resource teams and define who is qualified to perform what type of test methods;
  • manage availability: schedule the availability of your teams. You should be able to take into account all sorts of unavailability such as GMP training, meetings, administration time, holidays, long leaves, etc.

In periods of peak demand, QC labs exchange technicians. This is common practice between release teams for instance, where the HPLC certified often jumps in with different teams. It is important not to lose focus, to guarantee the timely delivery of all the work.

Step 3: Manage services.

While QC labs perform tests for different demand channels, modeling test methods to standardize work will help you to focus on the improvements only, and not on sub-optimizations. It starts with the definition of, e.g.

  • 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.

Step 4: Analyze capacity and get insight.

After the demand and capacity planning and services standardization work has been completed, you calculate your resource requirements. How easily can you shape endless reports to get answers to these type of questions?

  • Which teams can commit available time?
  • Which specific competences should team leaders develop or acquire?
  • What instruments have shortfalls?
  • How do the value-added versus non-value-added activities compare?
  • What is the workload for a specific project?
  • Which efficiency-improvement projects have the most impact?

Download our whitepaper - 5 principles to improve lab performance using lean lab strategies

Step 5: Simulate work and create scenarios.

Common practice in QC labs are the “What if?” questions that help you discover new possible issues that might occur, and compare different solutions before deciding upon the best option. We discovered a way to play around and calculate the return on investment on scenario questions such as:

  • 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 will be the impact of new products introductions?
  • What if we enlarge the test capacity by training new analysts?
  • What if we add extra technicians?

Step 6: Schedule task lists and track progress.

Last, but not least, is making sure things get done now that the planning has been completed. Providing teams with a comprehensive task list and tracking the work progress is what makes the difference. It will help you feed the performance dashboard with KPIs such as adherence to plan, throughput and foresight.

We know what you’re up against!

It isn’t easy, we know. We built Binocs to lend a hand. It’s based on our experience working with QC labs of clients such as GSK, Pfizer, UCB, NEOMED- LABS and others. If you have any questions, or there’s anything we can do to make you successful, please contact with Binocs. If you want to read a little more about Binocs in QC labs, read about the cooperation between Binocs and Lean Lab.