Your new biopharmaceutical product has the potential to improve outcomes for millions of patients around the world—and it’s poised to pass a critical milestone in U.S. Food and Drug Administration approvals. How will you position your facilities to ramp up production quickly? Smart real estate and facility strategies are essential to accelerate the journey from laboratory to production.

The following are four ways to help your facilities keep pace with research and development (R&D) and production demand.

Given lengthy regulatory approval timelines, exact product launch dates can be unpredictable. From a facilities perspective, the solution is readiness. For example, even idled production facilities require ongoing maintenance to remain ready for use on short notice. Understanding the current state of your production facilities and making essential improvements in advance will instill confidence in the infrastructure needed to bring a product to market.

Strategic enterprise real estate planning requires cross-pollination between different facility uses and organizational teams. This integrated approach prevents costly missteps and maximizes asset utilization. For instance, one client's facility organization was making plans to revitalize a facility within a year of lease expiration. As the provider to both the facilities and real estate sectors of the organization, we were able to identify this timing conflict and help the client determine how to resolve it, ultimately saving significant investment in a soon-to-be-vacated space.

When a medical device manufacturer in Puerto Rico needed to expand production for several new products, capacity was a significant issue because its active facility was being used to manufacture one of its primary products. A second, legacy facility was available—but was slated to be permanently closed. In a complex strategy, the company turned to its real estate and facilities team to revive the aging facility. Then, it transferred production of the primary product to the older facility and added capacity to the newer facility to handle the new products.

Another aspect of readiness is ensuring the availability of support services for facilities that would soon face high production volumes. In regulated GXP facilities, even seemingly mundane janitorial and pest control services are critical for maintaining compliance, and higher service levels may be needed.

Beyond the production facilities, your facilities team also should anticipate storage and distribution needs. When a COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer was undertaking its ambitious and fast-paced production program, the real estate and facilities team needed to not only ensure that facilities were ready to run smoothly, but also repurpose logistics and aviation space to accommodate the freezer capacity required for the vaccine.

Adding further challenges, the company lacked sales and marketing offices in the multiple foreign markets with an urgent need for the COVID-19 vaccine. The real estate and facilities team was tasked with quickly securing well-located sites for business operations in multiple countries.

Longstanding biopharmaceutical companies, including contract manufacturers, often rely upon older manufacturing facilities with aging building systems. Yet, aging systems can put production volumes at risk when a piece of equipment malfunctions or fails completely. To maximize uptime,  leading biopharmaceutical manufacturers are adopting next-generation, reliability-focused maintenance methodology that enables building engineers to detect and address emerging malfunctions before a failure brings production to a halt.

Another leading practice is to use a data-driven approach to lifecycle asset management and capital planning. Using mobile technology, your real estate and facilities team can create an asset registry that includes age, warranty coverage, expected lifespan and other details, and rank potential capital investments in terms of cost, urgency and importance.

Backed by data, your team can use the objective capital plan to secure C-suite support for investments that will benefit the larger business. Combined with reliability-focused maintenance, a data-driven capital plan can help you reduce capital expenditures and, most important, improve uptime and production volume.

To create world-class, highly reliable biopharmaceutical R&D and manufacturing facilities, it’s helpful to understand how industry peers manage their facilities, how much they spend and what technologies are being used. Since it can be difficult to uncover what competitors are doing, one the best ways to learn about industry practices is to partner with a life sciences real estate service provider with expertise in laboratory and production facility management (FM).

For example, a qualified FM provider will help you adopt reliability-focused maintenance, bringing access to sophisticated technologies to monitor equipment and proactively address building system performance issues to avoid costly downtime. When you need to accelerate speed-to-market, an FM provider can use its strategic sourcing resources to ensure that your laboratories never lack glassware, for example, and that janitorial, pest control and other support services are scaled up alongside production volumes.

Another leading practice is to establish standard systems, processes and technology tools to improve FM efficiency that can be vital when scaling up. For example, when a major biopharmaceutical company was on the brink of a major production surge, three longtime FM team members announced their retirements. Acting quickly, the FM partner was able to capture critical institutional knowledge from each team member and document processes as part of an FM playbook standardizing procedures for all manufacturing facilities.

If accelerated speed to market is the goal, working with a life sciences real estate service provider can shave weeks off a construction schedule—while keeping the project within budget. For instance, when a mid-tier biotechnology company faced an urgent opportunity to help address a public health crisis, it partnered with a life sciences project manager to bring a new 210,000-square-foot laboratory and GXP production facility online in an accelerated timeline.

The company enlisted a project manager early on to serve as owner’s representative and provide guidance on selection and installation of such critical systems as vibration sensors, infrared scans for electrical equipment, water injection, HEPA filtration and more, as well as overall construction management.

The project management team included FM experts to help establish standard operating procedures and set up a computerized maintenance management system and other foundational elements of FM operations. The FM team helped ensure the proper installation, calibration and certification of critical systems, and established streamlined, cost-efficient and value-added FM practices across the enterprise.

When you are anticipating a need to scale quickly, taking key steps can bring confidence that your laboratories and facilities are prepared to bring products to market. With key practices, tools and expertise, you can ensure the successful delivery of lifesaving treatments—and change patients’ lives for the better.

Are you ready to create value with efficient, compelling real estate and facilities that accelerate scientific innovation? Let’s chat.