Logbooks Use Case

Imagine you’re a manager at a pharmaceutical company who's responsible for ensuring facilities and equipment are properly cleaned in between batches. With a paper process, manual review for each cleaning takes significant attention and time, especially with common issues such as incorrect data entry, missing information, and poor handwriting. In an effort to address these problems and expedite resulting actions, such as equipment maintenance, you implement apps that reflect and aid this process. These logbook applications enforce standardized data entry, increase operator efficiency, and create immediate reporting analyses.

Logbooks involve documenting the state of a room, area, or piece of equipment for activities such as cleaning, maintenance, or calibration. Data review within logbooks provides proof of compliance to strict standards such as GMP and GDP.

These goals can be attained by frontline operators, quality personnel, validation teams, auditors, and managers.

Impact and Requirements

Traditional logbooks are binders of papers that people must manually record and review. This method is prone to human errors and gives no access to data in real-time.

Digitizing logbooks gains a holistic view of your operations and can accomplish the following objectives within your company:

1. Increased operator efficiency
   By reducing the time it takes to manually write data with automatic data capturing, operators can focus on efficiency and equipment maintenance.
2. Reduced risk
   Ensure that data entries are correct the first time with built-in guidance to reduce errors. Common human-prone errors such as being out of target range, bad handwriting, or missing data are eliminated with input validation and standardized formats in an app.
3. Reduced admin time for quality reviews
   Tedious, manual reviews take up a lot of time, whereas digital data is easier to read, understand, and mark as correct or incorrect. A senior manager at a pharmaceutical company reported a “75% reduction in time reviewing detailed logbooks”, according to a Forrester TEI Study.
4. Real-time data capture
   Captured data can become immediately visible to relevant personnel. With an ALCOA+ approach to data, integrity and visibility are vital components in Tulip apps.
5. Faster data analysis and reporting
   Data can feed directly into analyses showing trends and insights for KPIs such as cycle times between workflows, equipment uptime and downtime, and process parameters like temperature and pressure.

Logbooks are used in life science and food and beverage industries. Operations looking to increase their data accuracy and gain faster access to data can especially benefit from digitizing logbooks in their operations.

This use case has medium difficulty to implement. It is simple for app builders to create, but the tendency to create a scalable solution from the start adds complexity.

How to Get Started

Before you begin building a logbook app, it’s crucial to think about the scope of your operation. Here are some factors that will impact your app design:

• How big or small is your process?
  • How many rooms?
  • How many pieces of equipment?
  • How many items do operators come into contact with?
• What does the operational process look like?
  • How does an operator move through a room?
  • What is the sequence of operations?
  • What are tasks or procedures for each room?
• What is the relationship between equipment and assets?
  • Equipment status or states
  • Materials used for cleaning

When you build your logbook apps, keep in mind that each app should represent physical groupings of each asset. This means different apps for each zone being cleaned, maintained, or logged. You should also create a review app for personnel such as managers, quality validation, and auditors.

There are two characteristics for logbooks apps that can ensure successful implementation and integration with current or future use cases:

Agility
Agility in logbooks is crucial in order to build and deploy the first version of an app. After using an app version in production, you should then evaluate performance and iterate future versions to add capabilities. Your first app version should consist of essential features, and any app versions afterwards enhance those features based on your evaluation. Do accomplish this, ensure you have a clear scope of what functionalities are essential for the first version vs later versions.

Composability
Composability is important for logbooks because the information collected will be able to feed into other apps that tackle other use cases. For example: feed an MES with equipment status, connect maintenance logbooks with work instructions, etc. Use tables to store data that directly informs the operator’s process. This ensures that information can be used elsewhere from a central location.

Common App Features

By using the following features in your app, take full advantage of the digital capabilities for logbooks.

• Drop-down input selections to standardize responses
• Use Completion records for operator inputs and Table data to track physical and operational artifacts in the process
• Record history widget (Review by exception)
• Electronic Signature widget

You can also use plug-and-play device inputs to help speed up an operator’s process, such as a barcode scanner.

Extended Methods

After multiple iterations of your logbooks apps, you can consider integrating to an external database such as the following:

• MES - eLogbooks tell MES when the equipment is clean. This informs the MES to schedule more work
• QMS - Quality issues identified during equipment usage, cleaning, or maintenance can be escalated and addressed in QMS
• LIMS - Lab workflows rely on equipment to be properly maintained

Tulip Resources

Whether you want to learn more about Tulip features to build logbook apps or you want to use Tulip’s ready-made templates, we have the tools to help you get started.

Videos

• Weigh & Dispense and Equipment Logbook
• A Digital Transformation Series: The Do's and Don'ts of Electronic Logbooks

University Courses

• Build an Equipment Logbook

Library Apps

• Simple Logbook

Examples

• Tulip Data Functional Example