A very interesting article by Mark Mortensen and Heidi Gardner about organizations where senior managers and team leaders are increasingly frustrated by conflicts arising from what is referred to as multiteaming—having their people assigned to multiple projects simultaneously. With Binocs we share their vision. We...
There is a growing shortage of skilled knowledge workers, or “gold collar” workers. The inability to find and maintain enough engineers, programmers, systems designers, scientists and chemists is a serious threat to profitability and growth— especially for project-driven organizations in the information technology, pharmaceutical, and...
May 21st, 2019 is a big day for us, not only because it is the first day of the Binocs user meeting. It is also the day on which we’ll unveil our newest component: The Binocs performance Twin. The Binocs Performance Twin is a configurable...
Digitization, automation and online testing: The future of pharma quality control Recently, McKinsey published an interesting article on the vast improvement potential they see in pharma QC labs. The article positions three possible horizons for which QC leaders can aim: Digitally enabled labs Labs...
Business context We are a global regulatory affairs department that submits 1000+ submissions/year. We need to make and support delivery commitments to regulatory authorities and our internal supply chain and production partners. It is an understatement when we say that this is challenging. Improvement potential ...
Business context We work with Planisware as a Project Portfolio Management platform. Although quite complex, our PMO and project managers succeed in keeping an overview of the most important projects. The delivery teams have no access to Planisware. It helps for the prioritization and decision...
In a recent report, Michael Shanler summarized recommendations for the digitalized lab of the future. (“Life Science’s Lab Informatics Digital Criteria to Separate Vendor Leaders From Laggards”, 20 December 2018, link requires registration). When we scan for visionary reports on lab informatics, we get stuck...
Business context Every project is unique. Every task requires a different effort. Every activity has a lead time that depends on the business context. Shortly, nothing is standard and will not and cannot be standardized. That’s how we saw things until our department was dragged...
Cell and gene therapies are here, and they’re here to stay. In the last couple of years, very promising results were achieved. Examples include treatments for certain blood cancers that helped patients for which all other available therapies had failed. Another example is a treatment for...
We are grateful for the work with you in 2018 and we look forward to collaborate in the new year!
Business context We are a department of about 450 people. 70% of our work are projects that can be sub-divided into 12 project types with a standardized template. We execute about 1500 projects/year. Our performance drivers are productivity and planning adherence. Improvement potential Projects are...
Business context In 2014 we implemented the Lean Lab methodology. This enabled a major breakthrough in performance and throughput. In the past few years, we see a significant increase in demand variability, both in products as in volumes. We have reached a point where the...
Business context We are an R&D team of scientists that perform experiments in cell culture processing. It is important that the experiment schedule is accurate and that the scientists (mostly in teams of 2) are available at the right timeslots. Bioreactors and downstream equipment is...
About NEOMED- LABS NeomedLabs is a North American based Contract Research Organisation offering high-quality clinical immunology laboratory services. They serve pharmaceutical corporations, biotechnology companies, and healthcare / non-profit organizations with extensive expertise in delivering quality readouts for the clinical development of vaccines and immunotherapies. We...
Our chemical and microbiology lab teams with a headcount of 140 analysts perform release and stability testing for multiple products that are manufactured in our site. The teams are mainly technology-oriented and perform a part of the full test panel. Improvement potential Teams optimize their...
The webinar on KPIs that we organized earlier this month is now also available as a free course on our brand new Binocs Academy platform. So, don’t wait to register. The course is organized in short sections so you can follow it whenever you want and at...
Most of us think visually and when talking about resource planning often the first thing that comes to mind are Gantt charts. Gantts are great for visually breaking down projects and establishing/communicating timelines, but anybody who has worked with Microsoft Project (or similar packages) knows...
You had appraisal and target setting meetings with the people from your team, but aligning training and operational planning can be a real challenge. Let Binocs help you to ensure that the operational planning considers competence development. Frederik explains how in this short video. Embed...
Demand from everywhere Organizations get work demand in different forms and from different channels. Demand can come from Project Portfolio Systems in the form of work packages that are dispatched to multiple teams. It can also be derived from trial data in a clinical trial...
Binocs is used for capacity and operational planning in regulatory affairs and uses a RIM system (Regulatory Information Management) as a source of demand. It already integrates with Liquent from PAREXEL. In Q3 2018 we plan to have an operational integration with VEEVA Vault RIM. Binocs provides a...
GSK Vaccines Global Regulatory Affairs (a team of 400+ people) presented their experiences with Binocs resource planning at the Making Pharmaceuticals conference that was held in Brussels on March 14th. Why did GSK GRA implement resource management? Why did GSK GRA choose for Binocs? And...
Scheduling lab technicians (and equipment) is typically a time consuming job Demand and priorities change daily so the schedule has to be constantly adapted The supervisor needs to optimize campaigns (batching samples) You need to balance service level and lab efficiency overall, not case by case. (on time delivery versus high...
“Freezing activities “ in the context of this blog is about confirming time and resources, not scope. In our Binocs implementations this is often a hot topic but let’s have a look at this from a few different angles… The value of the...
Attention! We are approaching main stream. It’s our second time we attend the conference. When listening to the many interesting presentations, we see a clear maturity leap since last year. It looks like resource planning for knowledge workers is approaching the main stream and that’s...
Today, quality-control (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...
R&D resource planning seeks to answer the basic question: “What capabilities will we need in the future, and how will we get them?” The specialized nature of the knowledge involved, and the length of time it takes to develop required skills, makes R&D workforce-capacity planning...
Regulatory affairs: playing at the end of the game puts on extra pressure. Regulatory submissions in life-science industries are the most critical milestones in a new product development process and in the further product lifecycle. A solid submission process can accelerate time to market, bring...
When designing new features for Binocs, we’re always trying to optimize the user experience and to minimize the time needed to perform certain actions. We picked five of these time-savers to highlight. Demand: Copy-pasting demand folders Often similar groups of demands appear in a demand...
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...
Pharmaceutical products need to be analyzed quickly, accurately and in a timely manner before they are released and distributed to the commercial marketplace (= release testing). Timely is the key word. If releases are slowed down, money is lost. Lab supervisors, responsible for the analyses,...
The primary objective of the people who buy enterprise software is good, actionable output. App developers know this, and seduce buyers with the most fancy graphs, KPI dashboards and reports. Showing compelling output for a small demo environment is the easy part. Making sure the...
I’ve been using spreadsheet apps during my entire career (almost 30 years now). It started with Lotus Symphony on an IBM PC AT, then Lotus 123 and finally Excel. And I’m still a big fan! But I’ve been transforming spreadsheets to enterprise applications during my...
Binocs is a leader in smart analyst planning for QC, R&D and service labs. After increasing interest from our lab customers, we decided to step it up a notch. With the new release, labs can include critical test instruments and evaluate capacity requirements of both...
Binocs goes US. We’ll be presenting and sharing experiences at the Annual Strategic Resource Management conference in Philadelphia. The event attracts over 100 senior R&D executives, sharing best practices and new ideas on how to enhance R&D productivity, forecasting and planning. They participate in round...
Decide as late as possible and keep your options open. I heard this as an intro statement at some conference a long time ago, and for some reason I stored it in my permanent memory. When you read it, it’s obvious. Of course you need to...
Through casual conversations with customers and watching users interact with Binocs, one thing became very clear recently: We could make major improvements on the way users add extra (user configurable) information to Binocs objects. We dug in deeper. We asked a lot of questions. We...
Today, we can search through the entirety of human knowledge in less than one second, but can you search the entirety of the knowledge your company has created? A recent McKinsey report showed that knowledge workers spend an average of 20% of their time every week searching...
I recently stumbled upon a very interesting blog by Vilmos Rajda. He was a believer of the magic bullet project portfolio management sales people promised it to be. But after years of experience he came out a little disillusioned. In his blog he describes the most...
Christmas and New year pulled me away from the day-to-day rush and that was inspiring. The past three years, I focused on how organizations can improve resource utilization, especially for knowledge workers in environments such as engineering, R&D, quality and regulatory operations. In all of our implementations, we have setup...
A big part of change management in a project concerns overcoming resistance to the “new way of working”. Typically change management aware project teams take the following 3-step approach: Talk to people. List and acknowledge concerns and reasons for push back. Go through the list...
Although it’s pretty common for software applications nowadays, new website visitors that are exploring the potential of Binocs don’t have the possibility to log into an empty Binocs environment and just play around. It’s not that it’s technically a big deal for us to set up such...
Since it was launched in mid-2015, the Binocs cloud application for resource planning has enabled numerous QC (lab) teams, regulatory teams and R&D teams to match resource demand and capacity. Thanks to feedback and input from our clients, the tool has matured into a robust...
Last week, April 27, TayganPoint and Bluecrux organized a round table discussion on Resource Management in Regulatory Affairs departments. RA experts from Merck (MSD), GlaxoSmthKline (GSK), Johnson & Johnson, Covance and Gens and Associates gathered around the topic that was introduced by Apostolos Mamakis and Pierre Roussel from GSK...
One of the tricks used by the screenplay writers of the 1960s Star Trek TV series to show that Mr. Spock was an intellectual badass was to have him make calculations to a ridiculous degree of accuracy. This ludicrous precision made Mr. Spock legendary, but...