Thermo Fisher Scientific
Following on the heels of my first co-op, I took my next at Thermo Fisher Scientific in Plainville, MA. The facility was recently built to be one of the largest and most advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing and development sites in New England. My role consisted heavily of analyzing the process systems to implement and streamline the viral vectors development. By the end of my first contract, we had our first virality report of 99.7%, which exceeded both the target threshold and all expectations. It was around this time that Thermo Fisher also secured a contract with Moderna for their rendition of the Covid-19 vaccine, which I found interesting due to its significant relevance. After my initial contract expired, I was offered a promotion to a different role to complete on a part time basis while in school. One of my largest endeavors in the process engineering department was building the Spare Part and Risk Assessment program from scratch.
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Problem Statement:
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Design a program to track all 1,100+ pieces of equipment in procurement and their corresponding 1,500+ unique parts. Understand the functionality both and then create a system to identify the parts that are liable to break or are consumables and develop a cost-risk analysis following good cGMP practices to determine how best to spend company funds.
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Actions:
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Locate and tabulate all relevant systems and equipment in the facility to familiarize enough to analyze.
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Develop a weight-based scoring system to illustrate the importance of different factors to having spare parts
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Build an approval flow to streamline the documentation and reviewing of all system's individual plans.
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Create a PM (Preventative Maintenance) plan for all relevant systems to target highest priority systems
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Source reliable vendor contacts to help procure and source necessary purchases.
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Acquire third party training to software such as Ariba, Catalyst, and Blue Mountain RAM to be able to create purchase orders for received quotes. Can also create blanket PO's for repeat suppliers to draw from to reduce lead times.
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Keep engineering team updated on all incoming inventory and work with accounting team to develop personal spending budgets to purchase necessary high priority equipment as needed.
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Develop cloud-based inventory tracker using a barcode check-in/check-out system to track all equipment throughout the 300,00 square foot facility. Staff must access the site I made and scan their desired equipment out and indicate the intended location of use so as to have a paper trail of where all inventory was at any given time.
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Results:​
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The program reached full functionality and was then refined by the partnership of the Quality Assurance department to revise any errors throughout the process.
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The program is responsible for millions of dollars in capital and operation expense and is set to be the framework for the risk assessment of all equipment for the foreseeable future. It was a useful step in organizing the purchasing and procurement of necessary equipment while also saving costs on unnecessary spending or duplicate purchases.
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Streamlined any repairs or PM needed for the facility equipment. All equipment will be easier to find as it is tracked throughout the facility using the checkout tool.
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Through all these benefits, the facility has become more cost and risk efficient. Below is also a shortlist of other projects completed during my onsite time with Thermo Fisher.
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My roles as a part-time employee consist of overseeing the continuation of the Spare Parts and Risk Assessment program while also being in charge of processing all POs and quotes for any purchases within the engineering department while delegating different expenses to different available budgets.
