Francis Crick Institute opts for Spirit Data Capture’s goods tracking system

The Institute is an inter-disciplinary medical research facility, which seeks new ways to treat, diagnose and prevent illnesses such as cancer, heart disease and strokes, infections, and neuro-degenerative diseases. Its new building is nearly a million square feet and has 12 floors, posing a host of challenges when it comes to controlling and recording the movement of the roughly 7,000 packages each month that come into the institute.

The organisation’s logistics manager, Andy Steele, realised that it was vital to have an effective system for tracking packages (including proving that they’d been delivered) and ensuring that they reached the right scientist. When he joined the Institute, there were no logistics systems in place at any of the legacy sites. Goods receipt tracking was carried out by manual double entry into a Procurement / Finance system. The internal tracking was paper-based and there was inconsistency in terms of the records kept.

Steele therefore started looking for a suitable internal logistics and goods tracking system that would meet the needs of this complex new building. He wanted to speed up the goods receiving process and deliver a secure audit trail for the internal movements of items after their receipt. He explains: “This is especially important for an institute like the Crick, as many of the items are extremely valuable from a research point of view and couldn’t be replaced if they were lost.”