Apply the "Butterfly Effect" to Streamline Your Supply Chain

A butterfly flapping its wings over Brazil can influence the direction and severity of a storm in New England. Called the "butterfly effect," mathematic models have shown that even very small changes in one area of a system can create large variations downstream.
Applied to the pharmaceutical manufacturing process, there is a "butterfly effect" that has the potential to create large savings for your operations when viewed from a more holistic perspective. It's not where you would normally look to free up working capital and reduce inventory requirements. Yet that's the effect of adopting a rapid screening method in the microbiology laboratory.

Consider this: If your company's products are free from contamination 99% or more of the time, then why are these products held up for an average of 5 to 14 days while traditional microbiological limits or sterility tests are conducted? If only the tiniest fraction, 1% of your products at most, needs to be detained for the full 5 to 14 days for further evaluation, then why subject the remaining 99% of your clean production to the same timeline? Isn't it smarter to release clean product as soon as you can determine it is, in fact, clean? What's needed is an absence or presence test, the results of which can be determined in as few as 18 hours.