How Beam Therapeutics uses OpenBlue to keep biotech research moving

In complex biotechnology environments, equipment downtime is more than an inconvenience. A failed asset can disrupt experiments that take weeks or months to complete, slowing research that may one day lead to new treatments. With stakes this high, the facilities and operations teams at Beam Therapeutics knew they needed a workplace management platform.

Beam Therapeutics is a biotechnology company that develops precision genetic medicines through base editing – a technology designed to identify and correct mutations in DNA to potentially treat genetic diseases. The company operates an R&D lab and a 130,000-square-foot good manufacturing practice/quality control (GMP/QC) facility, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

For Operations Specialist Ian Lee, maintaining operational visibility across those facilities is essential. At the recent Johnson Controls Digital Technology Conference, we sat down with Lee to learn more about how technology is helping him meet the complex demands of operating, maintaining and optimizing mission-critical biotech facilities.

Can you tell us a little about the facilities your team manages?

The spaces include a mix of office environments, research labs and highly regulated GMP spaces. Each type of environment comes with unique operational requirements. For example, chemistry labs require extensive safety systems, including sensors and monitoring equipment to help maintain safe conditions for both employees and materials.

So, there are a lot of hoops that we have to jump through to make sure things work for everyone.

How are you using OpenBlue Workplace to help you manage those facilities?

In my department, one of our responsibilities is space planning. It's like a big jigsaw puzzle – we’re moving departments around, making sure things fit, confirming utilities are aligned with what people need, and ensuring safety considerations meet the standards of what’s required for the experiments that are being run.

What we're able to do with OpenBlue Workplace is identify and label where assets and departments are located. That gives us metrics on who's using what, where they’re using it and how much space they have per floor. We use that information in long-range planning to help support department growth and company needs to help us predict how much space they will need in the future.

We also use OpenBlue to track the life cycle and health of our equipment. It helps us juggle thousands of pieces of equipment and the cost associated with each of them and then prioritize which ones need the most important services so that we can keep things running.

OpenBlue enables us to keep a 20,000-foot view on everything so that our researchers never have to worry about what's not working or how we're fixing things in the background.

Why is equipment visibility so important in a biotech environment?

We have multiple types of equipment – mass spectrometers, fume hoods, enclosures and other devices that are critical for research flows. If those devices experience downtime, research workflows can be significantly disrupted. There are scientists who are running experiments for anywhere between one week to multiple months. And if a piece of equipment fails at any point within that, they have to start over. That can really push our progress back in the R&D sphere.

If we can stay on top of it – if we know, for example, that a piece of equipment has had four or five issues in the last six months – we can identify a different one that the researchers can use, or decide if we have to replace it all together. Having that predictability or understanding is incredibly important for our research lab operations teams. 

Before implementing OpenBlue, what were some of the biggest challenges your team faced?

We have some really equipment-heavy departments that have benches just filled with assets. Our hope is to track the lifecycle of that equipment better than we were before. One of the biggest drivers behind implementing OpenBlue was better asset and maintenance tracking.

Some of the equipment is nearing the end of its lifecycle. With improved tracking capabilities, we can now better predict and address maintenance needs, purchase preventive maintenance materials proactively and take care of the needs of the scientists more effectively. Now that we have OpenBlue, we can track the equipment, we can track the service done to it and we can track the service contracts that we have everything under. We can track the cost and the life cycle or health grade for each piece of equipment.

In addition, we have a couple different facilities, so it's a challenge for us to create a broad stroke process for everything covering all our sites and all our needs. With the flexibility we’ve been finding with OpenBlue, we’re hoping that can fit our needs and integrate itself into the company with a seamless transition so that people are able to use it quickly and efficiently to get things done.

What was it about OpenBlue that made it stand out from your current system or other platforms you were considering?

The rigor behind it – there was more that we could rely on when it comes to tracking assets and service contracts.

We also liked how OpenBlue allowed us to see everything as tables within tables. Our data exists on one table and now we can build out additional tables that track whatever we need it to. Assets is obviously the biggest portion for us. Then, if we have equipment that has specific needs for safety, we can have that as a table. We can track that information and wherever that piece of equipment goes, that data exists. If there are different types of chemicals that are used across pieces of equipment, again we can track, maintain and push forward maintenance.

All this data – whether it be costs, service contracts or something else – can now live seamlessly in one location instead of across four or five different spreadsheets handled by different departments. It's a one-stop shop for us to make sure that we can identify everything in an easy location.

Where does OpenBlue save you the most time?

One of the challenges of my role is tracking equipment locations. I have floorplans for our spaces, and every quarter I update those with the locations of every single asset. Typically, that involves me walking through every square foot on every floor in both facilities. And we are checking literally every piece of equipment.

The hard part is if somebody moves something, we have to figure out where they moved it to. Having to do this manually was challenging and exhausting. With OpenBlue, we can now set up and identify where equipment is located. So now, when I walk through the facilities, I can check a serial number, I can check an asset tag and I can adjust it and move it to the space that it's in. It’s no longer just me clicking and dragging or redrawing or removing equipment from my personal PDFs. The result is a huge amount of time saved and better accuracy.

We’ve also built out mobile functionality, so our technicians that support technical needs like gas changes, consumables and chemicals can update these records. If they go into an area and notice that an asset has been shifted or moved or a different department is using it, they can change that data. Then we can check it, confirm it and make sure it's all set.

What was implementation like with OpenBlue?

We only had about four months through the holidays to roll out OpenBlue for the company. Working with the OpenBlue team has been incredible. They are incredibly proactive. They work with us, they e-mail, they check in. It's not always me asking questions, it's them asking questions back to me to make sure the product fits the team's needs. 

And now the best part for me is I'm sitting here with a working product and only needing to make small adjustments to make it even better. So we’re able to communicate to leadership not only the great capabilities we knew about from OpenBlue, but these new things that we've updated to help make the system better, to help make it faster and provide additional features to the company so that we can continue working as fast as possible.

How does OpenBlue help you highlight and elevate the work you and your team are doing?

One of the challenges for our department is developing KPIs and metrics that really showcase the work we’re doing. Previously, it was limited to volume or spend. With OpenBlue, we can show how fast we're responding to things, how quickly we're repairing equipment and the cost savings that we’re creating.

That’s key for our team because we can now be even more proactive – determining when a piece of equipment is likely to go down, how long it will be down, when a space needs to be adjusted or when a department needs more space.

Because of how OpenBlue works, we’re able to track not just maintenance to our equipment, but service contracts. This has previously been done across multiple separate systems. Now it all exists together. From a metrics perspective, we can now present to leadership how much we are actually doing and maintaining so that the space can continue functioning optimally.

What value have you gotten out of attending the Johnson Controls Digital Technology Conference?

This is the first one I’ve attended, and it’s been eye opening. It’s a helpful reminder for me – and hopefully other customers – that organizations utilize OpenBlue in very different ways. Another conference attendee was asking a lot of really great questions – questions I didn't even think of asking. And I liked the way they were thinking. And some of these things I'm taking notes on. So, I'll speak with my implementation and success manager about whether these are things that we can bring into our OpenBlue system to hopefully streamline our processes or improve any of our business functionality to make it the best product or the best system possible.

It was also valuable meeting directly with OpenBlue employees to discuss different ideas about products that you’re working on and how those can change our functionality – from BMS systems to asset management to queries and metrics. Everyone has a different idea and uses OpenBlue a little bit differently, but those flows or processes can be implemented in other industries. And I think it's helpful to be here and learn a little bit about it. 

I’ll be back next year!