Avantor Services provides support so customer can focus on detecting COVID-19 and developing the coronavirus vaccine

Overview

One of our global customers has been working to address the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on testing patient samples to detect the presence of the virus and developing the coronavirus vaccine.

With governments expanding diagnostic testing for COVID-19, life sciences companies must adjust testing capacities to meet increased demand – all while working to develop breakthrough vaccines and treatments. This leads to new challenges for these companies.

Challenge

When increasing diagnostic testing capacity to handle growing sample volumes and fast-tracking vaccine development, our customer faced two challenges: Increased supply chain complexity across multiple sites; and increased waste. Our customer knew that managing inventory levels, including ensuring they have stockroom management protocols and point-of-use stocking capabilities, and reinforcing proper waste management processes were key to their success, and reached out to Avantor to help.

Action/solution

Our Avantor Services experts from our Lab & Production Services team instituted a strong, centralized inventory management solution to meet our customer’s needs – minimizing stockouts and ensuring products are exactly where they’re needed, when they’re needed. Our experts also established new waste management solutions.

Specifically, Avantor Services has:

1. Developed a new onsite supply chain replenishment setup, including the management of a central stock room and multiple stock locations
2. Implemented multi-shift replenishment model during weekends, enabling a continuous flow of supplies for testing
3. Created a process to identify and find alternative products, such as chemicals, reagents and consumables, in case there’s a stock shortage or new products become in-demand
4. Leveraged a tracking system to proactively manage supplies, ensuring labs are continuously restocked and there is no impact on testing output
5. Approached inventory management holistically, so that our customer’s entire supply chain is managed by Avantor Services, with daily and weekly inventory updates
6. Established new waste management protocols and solutions to handle significantly increased volumes

Results

Our collaboration, agility, innovation and customer centricity enabled a comprehensive solution for our customer. In a very short time, our customer has increased diagnostic testing capacity to over 10,000 samples per week. In addition, they are able to fast-track the research and development of a potential coronavirus vaccine.

Avantor’s experts were relied on to manage inventory and provide scientific services, including media preparation and waste management. As a result, our customer is able to focus on science that has the potential to improve patient outcomes.