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LANEXO® Inventory Manager logoLANEXO® Inventory Manager logo

Improving Inventory Management

with LANEXO® Inventory Manager

Company profile

Laboratorio Farmaceutico S.I.T. manufactures and packages solid oral, liquid and semisolid products. The QC laboratory in their Mede, Italy plant employs 2 lab managers, 2 coordinators and 13 analysts. This lab performs chemical and microbial analyses on incoming materials (active pharmaceutical ingredients, excipents and packaging components) and finished products, plus QC analyses required by regulations.

The Mede QC lab analyzes about 10 batches a day in total, mainly using 11 HPLCs, 3 GCs, 1 UV and 1 FT-IR as instruments. Annually, they manage around 2500 individual bottles and other items representing 500 different reagents, which are stored in metal or safety cabinets. Their inventory is composed of reagents from Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany and other suppliers.

 

Before the LANEXO® Inventory Manager

Before implementing LANEXO®, Lab. S.I.T. managed their inventory entirely manually, using an Excel file maintained on a PC outside the QC lab. Orders to the supplier were triggered by analysts, who periodically checked the cabinets and then filled in the Excel file each time a new package of reagents arrived. Only one person managed the file, and they did so without any automation or restrictions (no password lock, no blocked cells, no macros).

Analysts searched for all reagents using that same Excel file, which required a great deal of time and effort. Out-of-stock items were not automatically reported, nor were expiry dates. The lab was using a paper system to meet GMP requirements for reagents. Stock of certain reagents therefore often ran low, and some would expire without anyone realizing it because they were seldom used. Because of these issues and because the lab manages so many items with varying levels of use, keeping all of its inventory under control was a time-consuming challenge that required regular manual inventory counts.
 


“We often received complaints from analysts and from people managing the inventory.”

— GianMaria Ghisoni, Qualified Person & former Quality Control Manager at Lab S.I.T.

 

 Lab S.I.T. had three main objectives they hoped LANEXO® would meet:

  1. Never run low on or out of the reagents needed for analysis.
  2. Spend less time registering new reagents, and make registration data more accurate.
  3. Spend less time searching for reagents thanks to having an easy-to-use app right in the lab.

     

LANEXO® Inventory Manager implementation

System configuration was easy; data entry took more time but was easy as well. All analysts were trained on LANEXO®, which took three remote sessions of 2 hours each.

“The support of the entire LANEXO® Inventory Manager team was absolutely great!” Ghisoni enthuses. “They all supported us in each and every phase of the implementation, and we think it was a key enabler of our final success.”

 

Results

Since implementing Lanexo®, Lab S.I.T has more than halved their reagent registration time, and their stock is much more under control. Analysts say the system is very efficient and easy to use. The feature they find most useful is the location labels, which enable quick item registration and item search. While they don’t have a system in place to calculate precise metrics, they estimate that the LANEXO® Inventory Manager has saved them about 250 hours per year.

 

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