Below is the transcript of Jack Grinnalds’ presentation at the Tradeline Animal Research Facilities 2007 conference held in November. Grinnalds is the senior director of Facilities Management at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Here he reveals a fresh, hard look at the business operating models for this function in terms of operating metrics, energy, water use, staffing, labor issues, equipment operation and maintenance, costs, and areas for management improvement.

Good morning and thank you for the opportunity to share with you the success story we have had at Johns Hopkins in operating a cagewash facility for the Broadway Research Building (BRB). The BRB was occupied in 2003 and contains a 40,000-cage vivarium. At the time, I was the senior facilities person responsible for the design, construction, and occupancy of the building.

In mid-2006, the leadership of Animal Resources expressed concerns with the cagewashing equipment. They were not happy with the throughput and could not meet the number of clean cages needed per day to operate the facility. They wanted to take out two indexing washers and two robots, replace multi-million dollar equipment that was purchased just a couple of years before, and buy all new equipment. I asked to review the operations for a few months and then offer recommendations for improvements.

The review revealed a lack of supervision and management on a day-to-day basis in the cagewash facility because Animal Resources was sharing supervision between the vivarium activities and the cagewash activities. Also, there was no service contract from the equipment vendor. So the equipment was not being properly maintained. Without a service contract, the vivarium was not a priority customer with the vendor, and therefore it could take a day or two for a technician to make a service call.

One of recommendations was to re-establish a service contract, which immediately improved equipment service. Animal Resources implemented some of the other recommendations and in December 2006, asked the Facilities Management (FM) department to submit a proposal to assume operation of the entire cagewash facility.

Since February 2007, when we assumed operation of the cagewash facility, equipment run time has been reduced by 11 percent. That is the time per day that equipment is operating, with two shifts overlapping in the middle. The morning shift starts an hour later and the evening shift ends an hour earlier, thereby reducing operating time from about 17 ½ hours a day to about 15 ½ hours per day. Cage production has increased by 55 percent. In February 2006, the facility was producing about 2,200 cages a day. This is a 40,000-cage facility, with a current occupancy of about 34,000 cages and a changing schedule of every two weeks. Approximately 3,400 cages must be processed per day in order to keep up with demand. Currently, we are processing 3,400 cages a day and have peaked at 4,000 cages a day. Additionally, about $200,000 was spent in 2007 for equipment repairs.

The first year objective was to improve equipment operations and increase productivity. Considering these changes, the per diem rate has stayed the same. Animal Resources’ costs have remained the same; even though $200,000 was spent in repairs, there was a $117,000 savings. Facilities Management has a lot of resources and, if necessary, can pay for some things out of the departmental budget and not out of Animal Resources’ budget. The goal for Year 2 will be to maintain the productivity rate and start reducing the operational costs. Year 2 is where Animal Resources will see the savings that it can put through to the per diem rate.

Equipment Efficiency

Another recommendation was to remove all the clutter. Every horizontal surface, including the floor, was full of broken equipment, unfinished tasks, and other leftover items. It was very untidy. It is now clean and when it’s clean, it’s easier to keep clean.

The rack washer processes one 140-cage rack at a time. To increase productivity for the rack washer, only full cage racks are put through the washer. It’s literally a 100 percent improvement in efficiency. Also, the staff wanted to make cages, but they didn’t have the parts and resources to do so. We now maintain a stack of several hundred clean cages at any given time. If equipment goes down and the two conveyer belts are empty, we have the ability to then pull from the spare stack. Two parallel conveyer belts hold 24 pallets, which is about an 8-hour shift’s worth of work. If the equipment goes down, we have eight hours to get it back up again. We also keep clean racks with all the parts, lids, and wire bars for making new cages.

When Facilities Management took over the cagewash facility, the equipment run time was averaging 70 percent. Seventy percent of a five-day week is three and a half days, which means that for about a day and a half of the week the equipment wasn’t running. Equipment run time is now up to 90 percent, which is four and a half days a week. The other half day is Friday morning when staff is being trained. Previously, staff would leave the facility for up to two hours, but when they came back no work was being done. Now, every Wednesday or Thursday morning the director of support services, the manager of the facility, the staff service technician, the director of maintenance, and myself meet to discuss what equipment needs to be repaired and schedule it for an upcoming Friday morning. The run time has improved by having scheduled downtime on those Friday mornings when staff is already out of the building.

The dirty side of the dump station had the problem of stainless steel card plackets being caught in the grinder. A mockup was built with a new grate on the top where the diagonal dimension is a quarter of an inch smaller than the smallest dimension of the placket card holder. The placket card holders can go into the dump station, but they won’t go into the grinder. It was a very simple fix. The first re-designed grate was made out of steel, but it rusted after a couple of weeks. It was removed and two stainless steel grates were made for permanent use.

Each bulk sterilizer holds three racks. Staff training increased with the bulk sterilizer, so they know how to put the racks into the sterilizer without damaging the racks, how many racks fit,  and in what configuration they should be ordered to improve efficiency. On the sterile side, four to six racks are maintained in excess of what Animal Resources needs on a daily basis. Previously, staff would come in and take whichever rack they wanted. Now, we’re using first in, first out inventory control. Staff takes the first rack closest to a yellow line painted on the floor. Racks are moved forward, so staff is always taking the racks that we want them to have and racks in the back aren’t left sitting for several days. The most a rack sits on the sterile side of the room is about 24 hours.

There are two workstations set up at the end of the conveyor belt. It is the evening shift supervisor’s responsibility to set up those two workstations before he leaves. When the morning staff arrives, they don’t have to spend 20 or 30 minutes talking and collecting racks, cages, tops, etc., to make clean cages. They simply go to their workstation and start making cages. Take two people times 30 minutes per day times five days per week times 20 days a month--that’s a lot of manpower being wasted in 30 minute intervals.

Operational Efficiency

Prior to Facilities Management assuming the cagewashing operation, I met with each individual staff member to learn more about them both professionally and personally. I learned about their family lives and why some people had to work the day or evening shift. With that information we adjusted the two shifts closer together because some employees like coming in later in the morning, or leaving earlier in the evening. Management also took a turn manning every workstation. I emptied dirty cages and learned that you’re not supposed to inhale when you open a cage. The staff taught me how to break down a cage and how to make a new cage. We were getting employee buy-in. They understood that we were trying to improve their environment.

There is a lot of redundancy in this facility, but one of the non-redundant items is the 9500 rack washer. There is only one, and it holds only one rack. Previously, no one was tracking when a rack was in the rack washer and when it was ready to come out. A rack would go in and 10, 20, or 30 minutes later someone would realize, ‘Oh it’s time for another rack,’ and they’d put another one in. On the clean side, an individual is assigned to be responsible for just emptying the rack washer. Productivity doubles or triples when dirty and clean racks are rotated in and out of the rack washer every three to 10 minutes.

We also manage robotic operations. The dirty robot works really well almost every day and doesn’t require a lot of hand holding. The clean robot, on the other hand, has its challenges.  When we started working with the clean robot, it could not stack four cages at a time without making a mistake. It had a correction feature where it would set four cages, check them, and if they weren’t in the proper location, it would pick up the four cages and try to restack them again.  It never restacked them correctly the second time. So the intermediate step was to remove that routine from the program. The robot is now reprogrammed to set the cages, check them, and if stacked correctly to keep on going. The robot stops if the cages are incorrectly stacked. A person is stationed at the door, so we know within five or ten seconds if the robot has stopped. The productivity lost from taking a clean cage technician and putting him to watch the robot actually increases productivity of the entire assembly line because when a robot stops it can be restarted almost immediately. Since then the equipment has been repaired, and now it operates for two or three pallets before it makes a mistake. We reduced the speed of some of the robotic operations as it places the cage inside of another cage and stacks it. It is working much, much better now and is greatly improved. We’re also looking at upgrading the robot’s controls and operating system. There are about two more generations of robotic controls available since we purchased the system in 2003.

A lot of broken equipment was repaired. Stainless steel pallets with bent tabs, conveyer belts with broken links, leaking steam valves, and many other items have been repaired and serviced. Over the last three years a lot of the equipment settings had been randomly adjusted for no apparent reason. So, we reset everything back to its original setting.

Personnel Efficiency

To improve management of the cagewash facility, we hired a full-time manager for the day shift and a full-time supervisor for the night shift. Their shifts match the staff’s shifts, so there is an overlap in the middle. The managers have a chance to brief and debrief in the middle of the afternoon.

The day-time manager was already an animal care manager whose primary responsibility was supervising animal care technicians. His side job was operating the cagewash facility. So he was recruited to the Facilities Management department full time. His position was not replaced within Animal Resources.

The night-time supervisor is actually a bargaining unit member who was a work leader on the evening shift. He brought to the position a lot of knowledge of equipment operations, including some on the robotic side. Conversely, he had never supervised people before, and is now gradually being introduced to that. The day-time manager does have supervisory experience and is working with the night-time supervisor on building those skills, but his technical skills are extremely valuable.

All preventative maintenance work is contracted with a service provider, and we now have priority service with the service vendor. That technician is usually on campus three or four days a week, working on a variety of maintenance for a variety of people. We have immediate phone service with him, so if he’s not available he can talk us through some things. For the most part he can be at the facility within 30 minutes. Priority service from the service vendor has worked out very, very well for us. Most of the preventative maintenance is done on Friday mornings.  Anything that cannot be done on Friday mornings and requires more downtime is done on Saturdays. Most people are willing to come in on Saturday to work on the bigger tasks.

We are also recruiting a full-time staff engineer to work with our service vendor. His full-time job will be to focus on the cagewash facility needs and repairs first and other tasks second.

The evening shift sets up the workstations for the morning shift, and this has been a tremendous improvement in getting people to work faster. Written expectations are clearly stated and staff is held accountable. Those expectations focus on reporting for work and attire. Uniform shirt tails should be tucked in and uniform hats should be worn either with the brim forward or with the brim backwards. These same expectations apply to the cagewashing staff.

All cagewashing staff are now part of the Facilities Management department, who are all Johns Hopkins University staff. All of the animal caretakers, cagewash facility technicians, facilities custodians, and maintenance staff are bargaining unit employees.

When the Animal Resources staff joined the department in February, they were invited to the Employee-of-the-Year recognition banquet held in late February. The Animal Resources staff saw the recognition of fellow employees and they were also introduced as new staff to the FM department. They were included in the holiday parties, the summer picnics, the quarterly department newsletters, and immediately felt welcomed into the department.

There are promotional opportunities for the cagewashing staff to move into animal care. The current protocol is to train cagewashing staff to go through the Laboratory Animal Technician process, take the test, and become certified as an animal care technician. If a person cannot pass the test after two tries, they can continue taking the test on their own time and at their own expense. We encourage them to do that, but we will not pay for additional training time, nor pay for the test. They remain cagewash staff now and are not qualified as animal care technicians. Also, there is no more opportunity for overtime. Animal Resources used to bring in temporary help and work a lot of overtime to catch up. There has been almost no overtime since Facilities Management took over. Alternatively, we have trained six or eight custodians who are at a lower pay grade than the cagewash staff. This is a wonderful opportunity for them to move up into cagewash staff operations and they jump on it. Someone who is working a three to 11:30 shift can come in for three or five hours in the morning and then go to her custodial job in the evening. It is a great opportunity for advancement.

In the future, we are going to try to further reduce staff. The facility can function just fine with one less person who may be out on vacation or who is sick. There is a little bit of extra pressure when two people are out. So there’s certainly room to reduce staff, which will occur through attrition. There is also an opportunity to reduce operating hours. Equipment operating time is currently down from 17 ½ hours to 15 ½ hours, but we’re still running two 8-hour shifts that overlap. The goal is to reduce those two overlapping shifts to maybe an 8-hour and a 4-hour shift, either through flex-time or part-time schedules. Only about 12 hours of actual man time are needed to operate the facility.

Lessons Learned

To fully understand the cagewashing operations, we visited many other facilities: the University of California, San Francisco; Baylor University; the Stowers Research Institute in Kansas City; and Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farms. We’ve seen a lot of cagewashing facilities and we’re all doing the same thing, although doing it a little differently. At those facilities, we talked with the people in the trenches and the people who are working in the facility on a day-to-day basis. We exchanged a lot of lessons learned. Now, we’re able to predict and forecast equipment failures and the like. We know that on certain tunnel washers the heat exchangers fail in about three years. The University of California, San Francisco, didn’t know that, but they know that now because they are about three years into their equipment.

Management is required to be visible. The manager and the supervisor both have offices and are expected to be in on Mondays working on time slips and payroll, purchase orders, etc. The rest of the day they are expected to be out in the cagewash facility, watching what’s going on, providing resources to the staff as needed, and being visible. The staff actually works much better with direction. With minimal supervision, the staff tends to flounder. They want to work, but don’t quite know what to do. If the equipment goes down, they try their best to fix it and get it operational again, but don’t always know what to do. So, with a trained manager and a trained supervisor things are working much better now.

That’s our success story at Johns Hopkins University. While this was a one-year experiment between Animal Resources and Facilities Management, and we’re eight months into that, Animal Resources is already asking for a proposal for management of another cagewash facility on campus. I take that as a positive note that Animal Resources is happy with the work Facilities Management has done so far. There has only been one day in the last eight months where there was a 90-minute wait for cages to be available, and that was primarily due to some things beyond our control. We caught up and have been caught up since then. Animal Resources has been very happy with our production, and it’s definitely all about people and all about management.

We welcome your Questions and Comments

Copyright 2008 Tradeline Inc.
All Rights Reserved
ISSN: 1096-4894