Custom Kit Services Increase Efficiency, Enable Large Central Lab to Expand

Challenge

After internally managing the production and distribution of clinical trial kits for many years, a large global central lab was looking to expand their service and build up biorepository capabilities while still maintaining a high-value reputation with clients. The company had complex and dynamic protocols in place to accurately accommodate specific study and collection needs, demanding around-the-clock efforts of a dedicated staff and managing a sizable on-hand inventory to fulfill the wide variety of unique clinical trial orders.

Who could the company trust with their history of outstanding service while simultaneously aligning their expansion goals for successful growth into the future?

Solution

From a list of proposals competing for this important task, Therapak was chosen for its high-quality kitting services and center of excellence for managing inventory and resources.

Over a four-month period, Therapak worked with the lab to seamlessly transition the business while supplementing the process with enhancements based on experience in managing similar operations. Current kit production workflow and associated systems were studied in order to develop a turn-key competitive pricing structure that allowed the lab to take advantage of Therapak’s inventory management, kit production, and distribution outsourcing services.

By assuming inventory liability, Therapak enabled the lab to make better use of inventory across a larger pool of accounts and reduce waste, while only paying for the services rendered. In line with the inventory management efficiencies, Therapak offered similar benefits from a resource management perspective by cross-training the production staff across a number of accounts, floating resources as needed to support the unpredictable volume fluctuations caused by study changes.

Result

Through partnering with Therapak, the lab was able to outsource non-core kit production and distribution while providing clients worldwide access to a global supplier to better meet regional needs. The Therapak team took over management for thousands of various kit bill of materials for the lab – building kits on demand as orders are received to process supplies for a given investigator site and generating a high volume of batch records to manage 50,000 kits on a monthly basis.

More importantly, this outsourcing arrangement allowed the lab to free up approximately 10,000 square feet of premium space at their facility, paving the way for expanding their biorepository capabilities as a value-add offering to their customers. Management and support staff that had been running the kitting operations were also transitioned to set up and carry out these advancing biorepository services, filling the increasing demands of laboratory tasks such as sample processing.