What employees are saying
"I am proud to provide new automated solutions to the component lab."
Philippe Jacquet
Sales Consultant - France, WB Processes
CaridianBCT Solutions for the Component Processing Lab
Component Processing Lab
Efficiency and quality control in the component processing lab are key to producing high quality components. As the need for blood components grows, you're collecting more whole blood to meet either all or part of that demand. Maintaining quality control and process efficiencies is difficult with all the manual functions performed in your component lab. If you process a lot of whole blood, you understand the frustrations experienced by blood centers around the world.
Today, component processing in your blood center is very labor-intensive. It requires multiple, separate steps, performed by trained staff, to turn a unit of whole blood into platelets, plasma, and red blood cells (RBC). In the United States, all of these steps must be complete within eight hours of the whole blood collection. If you use the buffy coat method to separate whole blood into RBCs, buffy coat, and plasma, your manufacturing process is equally labor-intensive.
Challenges throughout the processing lab
Because we make products used throughout the blood center, CaridianBCT spends a lot of time speaking with blood center management and staff, including personnel from the component processing lab. In our efforts to create products that automate blood center operations, we've learned about the challenges of whole blood component production. These challenges can be seen in especially the following four areas:
Regulatory: Manual component production is labor-intensive and creates lots of opportunities for errors. Tracking process controls and instrument quality control is difficult. The eight-hour processing constraints on U.S. blood centers restrict workflow efficiency and flexibility in the lab.
Process/product: Product quality variances, product wastage and quality control failures impact the blood center's ability to provide needed components. It also impacts revenue generation.
Personnel: The labor intensive nature of component processing causes high rates of repetitive motion injury (RSI). Staff turnover for these jobs is high, and new employee training is lengthy. Plus, anytime you have staff turnover you add additional costs to overhead. The eight-hour time constraint also means that most of the work rolls into the 2nd shift, which may contribute to the high turnover rates.
Information Technology: Government regulations over component collections demand that all process steps be captured and recorded. Many of these steps get recorded manually, causing errors that are difficult to track. The recording requirements add to the labor-intensive processes of each step.
Movement toward lean manufacturing
Over the last decade, manufacturers in a variety of industries have adopted the philosophy of "lean manufacturing" to improve operations. Although blood center processes differ from those in traditional manufacturing, blood centers are adopting many of the principles of lean manufacturing to streamline their operations. Lean manufacturing is based on the underlying principle that non-value-added activity constitutes waste and should be eliminated from the process. The challenge within a blood center is to achieve this goal while still maintaining regulatory compliance.
We are working to change whole blood processing and help component labs achieve lean manufacturing by combining automated technology, collection and processing bag sets and information technology into one system designed for manufacturing components from whole blood.
Learn more about what we are doing to automate whole blood component processing. If you use the buffy coat method, the OrbiSac System (not sold in the US) automates steps in buffy coat processing. If you want to produce red blood cells and platelets, the Atreus System provides a self-contained, automated manufacturing system to process blood components from whole blood units.
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