At Astrix, we work with clients across the functional areas of their organizations to drive a value engineered approach to their platform investments. We don’t simply execute your project, we value engineer it in order to maximize its value impact to your organization.

Pressures to do more with less requires successful R&D organizations to innovate faster with constant or shrinking budgets. To boost innovation potential and operational efficiency, Astrix leverages a value-engineering approach to maximize resources and deliver innovative solutions. Value engineering seeks to identify all elements of function and cost in a project, and balance them against one another in order to maximize the project’s function while minimizing life-cycle cost (capital, operating, and maintenance). This approach assures that you achieve maximum value for each dollar spent on your project.

A key feature of the Astrix value engineering process is a facilitated workshop, which is held during the design phase and brings together people representing all of the functional areas involved in the project. During this meeting, we work with project stakeholders to value engineer your project:

Step 1: Define Organizational Objectives – During the initial phase, the team gathers information from project stakeholders, including details about the objectives, key criteria, definition of value, and how success will be measured.  A mapping exercise is performed to identify opportunities for creating value against internal priorities and initiatives.

Step 2: Map “As Is” State and Identify Gaps – Break-out sessions are organized by functional areas, and the team interviews scientists about their current processes. During this session, we document all relevant laboratory workflows in order to create “As Is” process maps. These maps become living documents and form the basis of the “to be” state and are meant to be periodically reviewed and updated.

Step 3: Analyze the Issues and Gaps and Propose Solutions – The team analyzes the gaps identified in order to determine the root cause of the issues. This is followed by a brainstorming session to come up with as many ways as possible to optimize laboratory workflows and to reduce lifecycle cost.

Step 4: Build R&D IT Roadmap – Our project team analyzes all the results from the previous steps and lays out a robust value engineered roadmap that contains recommended solutions to optimize critical KPIs and functions, while minimizing costs. The roadmap defines the target business processes, platform(s), solutions and applications – mapped to internal priorities broken down by functional area.

The Astrix Collaborative Value Assessment cuts across silos to align specific functional areas with solutions that drive value across the organization – down to the actual applications that are being used by the scientists to perform their daily activities.

Done right, value engineering can make an enormous contribution to your R&D operation.

Innovate & Optimize

• Challenge performance
• Drive an innovative culture
• Understand new innovations
• Pilot disruptive strategies
• Engage top talent

Collaborate to Discover

• Diagnose performance gaps
• Understand top performer strategies
• Prioritize high impact opportunities
• Monetize solution value
• Develop roadmap for change
• Justify investment

Change & Achieve

• Enforce business accountability
• Overinvest in competency build
• Speed adoption process from top
• Measure performance
• Address obstacles to performance
• Celebrate success

Design & Build

• Establish value based governance model
• Design for value
• Scope for high impact
• Embed performance metrics at design
• Drive standardization of processes & data
• Assign business ownership/accountability

Examples of outcomes based on using the Astrix Collaborative Value Assessment

• Changing the way customers work
• Transforming & Digitalizing Workflows
• Increased Performance based on process re-engineering

Assess impact on quantifiable value dimensions:

• Acceleration: “Are you able to perform key workflows faster?” “Are turnaround-times compressed?”
• Automation: “To which degree have reporting/data massaging/setup tasks been automated?”
• Simplification: “Have workflows been streamlined?” “Has complexity decreased?”
• Data Integrity: “Are data error rates reduced?” “Is there less rework needed due to lack or faulty data?”
• Collaboration: “Do workflows simplify communication of results and requests?”

Some of the benefits that flow from this approach include:

• Delivers a more holistic view of the project value to the organization
• Provides for more effective and informed decision making
• Facilitates realistic budget development
• Ensures that project objective are met
• Provides cost savings by focusing the project effort
• Accelerates the design process
• Improves project culture – lines of communication opened up between different stakeholders
• Improves return on investment (ROI)
• Expedites project schedules
• Delivers a solution design centered on performance and quality