Improving Vaccine Inventory Utilization Using R-Based Statistical Heuristic Algorithm

• Activity Number: 380
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 2, 2016 : 10:30 AM to 11:15 AM
• Sponsor: Biopharmaceutical Section
• Author(s): Hesham Fahmy*
• Companies: Merck
• Keywords: Biopharmaceutical ; Vaccine ; R ; Algorithm ; Inventory

Abstract

Due to the increasing constraints in vaccine manufacturing to meet all product specifications, we developed an R-based algorithm, integrated in Excel®, to uncover bulk cans that were not identified by the manual allocation process. The new system increased the amount of available bulks by 200% and significantly reduced allocation process time in addition to its ability for real-time inventory evaluation. The new system was written in R, and integrated with Excel®, to make the new tool more practical to use for engineers and scientists. In this presentation we will discuss the new system and show its capabilities.