Industry
Biotech Company, Pharma Company
Company
Client is a commercial pharma company focused on creating medicines that pioneering controllable cell and gene therapies to deliver transformative outcomes for patients with intractable diseases.
Solution Summary
The goal of customer was to establish a centralized application for the employees to plan office space usage in these hard times of pandemic. This would empower the employer to restrict the office/ Lab spaces so that the social distancing measured are implemented with highest integrity. It also helps track the potential threats posed by contacting an active COVID-19 affected user. This helps in reducing time taken to plan office/Lab work and will reduce the miscommunication between the scientists and researchers regarding the Office/Lab space.
The solution was to provide an interface to an office/Lab user to schedule activities ahead in time and tag the equipment that is being used to perform the activity. It allows lab users to identify location capacity conflicts and alerts the user of a location if overbooked. A group of activities can also be created under one experiment. It also enables to clone repetitive tasks performed in the office location.
Intellectual dashboard was planned in Power BI to represent the activities going in the office with intuitive reports and analytics. This help highest visibility both the user and the administration while ensuring maximized social distancing.
Challenge
Client had sheets to manage the office location/ Lab space, which does not show real time information of the total attendance and usage of the Labs/ Office. Scientists had difficulties to track. It was hectic to plan office in advance as it would often result in conflicts or cancellation.
Solution Strategy
Our approach was to put the user first, perform research and gain insights. We identified over 50 Stakeholders across the organization that helped bringing forward a diverse set of expectations from the future office/ Lab space to be compliant to the set COVID-19 rules by the CDC.
Azure Web application with React + Node JS express and a backend with Azure SQL are the fundamental building blocks for the application. The user is authenticated with Azure Active Directory login credential. The application has a robust schema in the backend to cater different types offices/Labs which is created in Azure SQL.
The application is providing features that user needs to quickly plan and track the activities. Creating separate tabs for each of the below
• Should be able to create group of activities
• Should able to create single activity
• Should be able to plan for single, multiple or entire office space.
User friendly responsive forms are designed to plan self, colleagues or visitors’ activities in the office location based on configurable shift timings across locations, this is to target the various user roles an organization would require.
Once an activity is created it will show availability reporting for monitoring. Grids are created with grouping activities of the current logged in user and upon changing of filter all activities of the organization are loaded. The components help user plan for weeks while highlighting the number of activities to capacity of the location.
Alerting/ warning the user of the locations that are functioning at the fullest of the capacity is one feature that helps user understand the conflicts in usage of the office space in real time.
Results
- Intuitive and graphical user interface for entering data
- Plan a single activity or an experiment with multiple activities
- Plan based on Date, Shifts, Locations, and Equipment
- TBD shift for long term planning
- Location availability information handy while planning an activity
- Plan for employees or visitors, delegated bookings
- Can be used for office and lab spaces
- Plan experiments with series of activities, all from one interface
- Clone activities and experiments to create new ones from templates
- No need for COVID-Response-Calendar
- Real-time conflict identification using Status lists with visual queues
- Improved Day Activity View and other reports
- Future planning made easy with 7-day calendar of activities with visual markers
- Resolve conflicts right from the calendar by contacting activity owners
- Personalized activity and experiment dashboard
- User friendly interfaces which allow users to do more work with less clicks
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