Optimizing a new refilling activity within biobanks using RFID technologies
Abstract
Contactless technologies can improve the production and supply chains at different levels. An important point when estimating the relevance of their implementation is that they can allow new activities and working schemes. This study presents the case of inserting contactless technologies in biobanks. Biobanks have to sustain the tasks of storage, converting and handover of human, fast perishing and potentially infectious samples. Due to extreme cold chain constraints, database and inventory inaccuracies and the time for inventorying, biobank managers hesitate to refill boxes where sockets have been set free. In addition to the operational gains of accuracy and performance, introducing new auto-ID devices may allow this activity and generate large savings that may legitimize the costs of their development and/or implementation. The subject of the presentation will be the optimization problems involved by the refilling activity in biobanks. This new activity is mainly constrained by the fact that samples must not be exposed to room temperature for a too long amount of time. Other constraints come from the fact that biobanks optimised their processes to improve their efficiency and quality of service according to the inaccuracies they know their database is subject to. As auto-identification should reduce significantly error probabilities, some of those auto-imposed constraints will not be taken into account. Different models and properties of these problems will be presented.