Share thisThe use of industrial engineering practices and 3D simulation in the development of new or renovated vivariums, provides a means of maximizing holding room densities while identifying the most efficient use of manpower in animal husbandry and colony management.
When designing a new facility or making changes to an existing small animal vivarium, conventional wisdom would lead planners and operations personnel to pack a holding room with as many cages as possible to maximize room density, and thus provide the greatest return on capital investment and lowest costs per diem.
While all this seems logical and quite necessary, in many cases, the return on investment is more than offset by ongoing manpower penalties associated with animal husbandry and colony management staff working in holding rooms that are not optimized for the labor intensive tasks at hand.
In addition, there is always the question of exactly how many technicians are actually required to operate either a new or renovated facility. Staffing levels in many instances become nothing more than a “best guess” based on experiential knowledge rather than decisions based on analytical methods and hard data.
So how do others do it? Planners and operations managers in other industries such as automotive, consumer goods, and telecommunications utilize industrial engineers to work alongside architects in the planning and design of new or renovated facilities. This is done to ensure that both manpower and building arrangements are optimized for a given operation. Using a “simultaneous engineering” approach guarantees that the facility and personnel will operate together in a most efficient manner – long before the brick and mortar phase of the project begins.
Gather the Data
The first step in optimizing staffing arrangements for either a new or renovated facility involves gathering data. Industrial engineers perform what’s called a “current state analysis” to identify all the tasks associated with a given operation, i.e. changing cages, performing animal health spot checks, inventory counts, etc. All of these activities are recorded, broken down into smaller elements, and then finally “coded” using a database of nationally accepted time standards, to assess manpower levels. This analysis uses the same tools and techniques that have been around for decades in the automotive industry, as a means of maximizing labor used in manufacturing, and applies it directly to lab animal research to make husbandry operations more efficient.
The current state analysis serves as a validated baseline that provides the architects and engineers with a starting point for the initial design and planning of the proposed facility using “real world” data.