For example, if the company vision is to add four high-throughput production trains in the next four years, a strategic facility planner will go into the data to develop an appropriate four-year roadmap. That could mean launching your first two production trains now, then returning to the data in two years to optimize those existing trains and to adjust if, how, and where to expand with two additional trains.
In the intervening years, anything might have changed: your R&D pipeline, your available capital, the market dynamics that impact your growth. This cycle of staged adaptation and growth gives you the flexibility to adjust to these changes quickly and cost-effectively. As the life sciences industry changes around you, a facility planner helps you change with it, without the expense and interruption of extensive renovations.
Assumption #4 about facility planning: This is an expansion, not a greenfield project. So…We don’t need a strategic facility planner, right?
For any type of project—a new build, a renovation, an expansion—success depends not only on the bricks and mortar of the built environment, but on how companies define, evaluate and maintain their plan going forward.
That is the strategic planner’s wheelhouse. Even (and especially) once your project is complete, the planner will collect and analyze valuable operational data to inform future space management decisions and to ensure that your capital project, no matter what it is, stays flexible and scalable long into the future.
Take the example of a facility that recently added new lab space and now faces an important choice: who gets to use it? Every group lobbies for their cause. Facility managers believe they know who ought to move in—but they consult a strategic facility planner first. The planner analyzes the current space, identifying bottlenecks, key adjacencies, and future requirements. In the end, rather than validate the facility managers’ assumptions, the planner uncovers an option that few had considered. Using facility data to defend this option, the planner explains how this plan will optimize and expand the company’s current throughput and lay the groundwork to meet their future manufacturing projections.