Avantor’s expertise in inventory management helps support the development of a potential coronavirus therapy

Summary

Our Avantor Services group supported a customer that has been working to develop a therapeutic treatment for the COVID-19 virus. To focus on fast-tracking a treatment, the customer identified gaps in their operational capabilities and inventory management practices that needed to be addressed to ensure they had the products and supplies available to develop the therapeutic treatment. As a result, our team was called on to provide a holistic inventory management solution from package receiving handling, to managing a higher level of inventory (including six months’ worth of inventory on key products), to ensuring no out of stock situations occurred across their multiple lab and research buildings.  

Overview/Challenge

With the spread of the COVID-19 global pandemic, companies are moving faster than ever to identify and develop therapeutic treatments. In an effort to fast-track their research and development, Biopharma companies will continue to face new and unexpected inventory management challenges. The last thing an organization that’s developing a treatment wants is to have their scientists spending time on non-scientific tasks.  

Faced with increasing inventory challenges due to fast-tracking the identification and development of a therapeutic treatment, one of our customers needed a solution that would enable them to expand their operational capabilities and inventory levels without interruption to their antiviral development process. This expansion presents a challenging environment: It requires the right products in the right place at the right time – without fail – to support this critical scientific workflow across multiple buildings and labs.

Action/Solution

Our onsite Avantor Services lab and production personnel collaborated closely with the customer to fully understand their inventory and supply requirements in developing their potential treatments. By understanding their operational and research needs, our team was able to identify inventory management solutions that helped optimize the development process to efficiently move their research forward.  
Some specific actions we took to ensure our customer can focus on science:

• Set up daily inventory management protocols, including receiving product onsite and point-of-use stocking capabilities
• Developed a new inventory management process to handle expanded inventory requirements at their facilities, including six-months’ worth of supply for key products
• Instituted weekly and long-term planning processes to support and manage their dynamic inventory needs

Results

Our customer’s therapeutic treatment candidate is underway.  Inventory management protocols are in place, ensuring appropriate stock availability across multiple buildings and labs at the customer’s site. The Avantor cross functional team is setting science in motion by helping in this potential life-saving drug development.