Brooks sample management transforms productivity at Sanofi-aventis

Citation

(2012), "Brooks sample management transforms productivity at Sanofi-aventis", Industrial Robot, Vol. 39 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.2012.04939baa.006

Brooks sample management transforms productivity at Sanofi-aventis

Article Type: Mini features From: Industrial Robot: An International Journal, Volume 39, Issue 2

A new automated, £5 million compound store developed by RTS Life Science (now a member of Brooks Life Science Systems), has led to significant improvements in the productivity of Sanofi-aventis’ chemists and biologists involved in the drug discovery process.

Olivier Casamitjana, Toulouse Chemical Library head, Sanofi-aventis R&D, explained: “Now that we have been using our robotic liquid and powder stores for three months, we have been able to assess the improvement our 18-strong team of technicians has been able to deliver when compared to our previous manual methods. We have calculated that even with some expected teething problems, we have achieved a gain of productivity around 80% for the compound loading and retrieval process in both the powder and liquid stores. We have also achieved a 50% productivity gain in the management of the collection plates contained within the liquid store”.

“There have been other benefits too. We now have 100% traceability of all our compounds, because each operation is tracked by the system. Also, even though the teams staffing the three laboratories only work office hours, the robots within the stores are set to work overnight, meaning orders are fulfilled and waiting in the buffer store for the next working day. Since the introduction of the RTS stores, we’ve also benefitted from optimised laboratory processes, as the technicians no longer spend so much of their day fulfilling orders. To a robot, the difference between an order of a single compound, or an order of 1,000 compounds, is small. To a person, the difference is vast. As a result, we’ve been able to consistently meet our 48 hour goal to meet orders, with most now being fulfilled within 24 hours”.

Sanofi-aventis’ compound collection has grown over the years, partly organically and partly as a result of a series of company mergers. At the same time, many new compounds have been synthesized and the demands of combinatorial chemistry have grown ever greater. It quickly became apparent that a single store would not suffice, so it was decided that two separate stores with two robots, one at +20°C for powder vials and one at −20°C for collection plates would offer the best solution. A benchmark of system qualities including robustness, cost, throughput, ease of maintenance and robot characteristics was agreed upon, and three potential suppliers sourced.

“As this was a strategic investment, we were looking for a technological partner”, said Casamitjana, “and it quickly became clear upon visiting other RTS stores that we had found one. RTS had obviously already developed the technology successfully, but they also offered flexibility to create a solution that would work with our existing systems. We especially liked the fact that, wherever possible, RTS systems include redundancy, which allows our processes to continue in the event of a technical problem”.

One of Sanofi-aventis’ key requirements was that their new stores would have to link seamlessly to the company’s pre-existing automatic weighing stations. In addition, as the Sanofi-aventis technicians were spending a significant part of their day transferring materials between labs and freezers, Sanofi-aventis management required a system that could efficiently handle thousands of vials and plates simultaneously.

In response to this challenge, for the liquid store, RTS developed an entirely new method of loading and retrieving plates. Central to the new loading technique is a trolley design which features a removable cassette. Each cassette covers the equivalent of 90 shelf positions giving it the capacity to hold 540 plates. The store has five docking stations which together allow 2,700 plates to be processed in each load and remove operation. To load plates into the store, the technician opens the trolley bay door, pushes the trolley into position and pulls the release lever.

Critical to the success of the RTS compound stores at Sanofi-aventis is the d-Sprint scheduling software, which manages store operations and the SIS database, which keeps track of all the plates, tubes and vials in the inventory. Sanofi-aventis’ compound ordering system is Titian’s Mosaic for which both systems already had a generic interface.

Philip Cummings, one of RTS’s principal software engineers, commented: “From a software perspective, the two stores are treated as one, with positions for new additions to the collection being random, so as to minimise partially filled racks and therefore maximise storage density. The robots pick in parallel and can exchange racks at the picking station. There are complex algorithms behind the choice of picking station to reduce the number of re-picks required to compile each output request. To be certain all the software could do its job and cope with the huge numbers of compounds being loaded at any one time, we carried out extensive simulation testing prior to fully testing the software integrated with the robotics in our factory”.

Following the installation and testing of the system at site in Toulouse the RTS project team trained Sanofi-aventis’ technicians and laboratory managers how to operate the equipment. Casamitjana commented: “Initially, I think some of our teams were worried about the robots and the English software, but the training has been so good and the software interfaces are so intuitive that they quickly overcame these fears and instantly saw the positive benefits to their roles. Implementing something on this ambitious scale always involves change management and I can say with some pride that we have succeeded”.