Roche Webinar Notes - In Case You Missed It!

Your opportunity to get the answers direct from the experts, direct to your Solver Community!

Here’s the sixth in this series, relating to last week’s Challenge Space from Roche: #Change the world with Roche: Novel and Improved Approaches to Automated Inventory Management! This Challenge closes in 8 days so I hope this proves useful!

Here are the notes I took during our webinar! Please be aware - there were 20+ questions - so please also use the event page above!

First point is that Stefano mentioned Solvers should always be looking for innovation in their implementation. Roche is a huge global company that already uses barcodes, RFID, smart shelves, and complex infrastructure. Their main goal is to have the right equipment, in the right amount, at the right place, and at the right time. They are looking to solve the problem of automated inventory management all the way along from ordering, through to delivery to central sites, storage, and then further delivery and usage at local sites.

  • Q: Do Roche centralized storage facilities use automated equipment already?

A: “It is different from site to site. Roche has thousands of labs for 100,000+ people, but once it is delivered it is stored centrally. Roche is looking to improve local delivery and the cascade of possibilities after it. Once goods are delivered, they are assumed to be in this storage room - Roche is trying to solve the subsequent registration on arrival into lab storage units.”

  • Question around granularity - when an end user from one lab space takes something from the lab unit, is it assumed to be within that lab space? Or is there potential for it to be elsewhere?

“It can happen, Solvers’ tracking and automated inventory management solutions should also consider this variability and verification of location outside of units (central, local, or lab).”

  • Is storage tracking only one-way (single journey by a single user) or should Solvers prep for multiple journeys (e.g. other users, journeys, locations)?

“Multiple point journeys should be the focus. Tracking the usage of materials between shared inventory spaces and shared workspaces.”

  • Is Roche utilizing a specific ERP (enterprise resource planning) system in conjunction with their inventory management today? If so, which one?

“Most commonly, we are working with SAP - however considering our global geographies and multitude of sites, this is not the only one. Solutions with the flexibility to work with multiple ERPs are favorable.”

  • Do you have forecasting methodologies for materials entering the central storage?

“Not in a centralized way - when this does occur, it is manual and done in the field by collecting the need, monitoring the use, and drawing down from there. This is most often done for standard lab materials used by everybody, e.g. gloves, but is more difficult e.g. for project materials / experiment requirements work.”

  • Do you use Excel for managing inventory?

“At the local level, yes, this is the case. It is mainly done by visual checking, however. Some areas have smart shelves which update systems, or barcodes and RFID are also used. The focus of Solver’s proposals should be about having the right material at the right place at the right time.”

  • Are you facing reduced outcomes as a result of inventory management problems?

“Yes, and the end users are the ones who are most affected. If you are conducting a time-sensitive experiment and your desired materials are not available, it can result in time loss and waste of other materials.”

  • Can you give us a picture about the scale required?

“Roche deals with many billions of materials every year, of various types/shapes/fragilities/units, across many geographies. Try not to worry too much about specific use cases and think more about the system requirements.”

  • Would solutions based on blockchain technologies be of interest?

“Absolutely! Multinationals may move slowly, but if it is clear that the technology’s implementation is innovative, we would be interested.”

  • Would item and action recognition from video streams be interesting?

“Investigating internally at Roche, too - it is not necessarily novel to us, and important to monitor, and our IT and security teams have privacy/security implications. However, if this can be achieved at scale with existing infrastructure (e.g. cameras) and not new hardware, this could be of interest.”

  • What is Roche’s position on training for employees to use the system?

“We’re looking to minimize the effort of the final user with regards to any system. For instance, scanning a barcode to check something in and out of a room is fine, but loading up a manual software and individually changing e.g. the weight of a reagent would be too complicated. In the central storage facilities, we have supply chain experts who would be fine with training and upskilling to scale the system, but we have the end user in mind.”

  • What is considered expensive?

“To give a scale of the opportunity, at some site levels, not tracking materials results in $1-2m+ in lost value from expired/misplaced/not available materials. And that’s just at one site! The ROI for an effective system would be very high!”

  • Should Solvers also consider robotic handling and delivery as part of their automation?

“No - we investigated this internally. It was turned down for cost implications. We want to first sort the problem of inventory management with an innovative system so that is the scope of the Challenge.”


Hopefully this was a helpful round-up and as mentioned on the day, remember to sign up and apply to the Challenge in order to be considered.

Thanks again to Stefano from Roche and good luck to all Solvers participating in the Challenge! As a reminder, it closes on the 18th June at 23:59 US Eastern Time, and this Challenge has a guaranteed award of US$15,000 with no IP assignment.