Transferring process know-how from one organization to another is an activity fraught with potential serious failures. If the transferring organizations engage enough resources in the effort, the number and criticality of errors and miscommunications can be minimized and failure avoided. However, the effort required to achieve the needed mitigation can be more than most organizations are able to expend and the time for the effort is almost always limited.

For example, gathering the information for the transfer of a synthetic route from a pilot plant to a manufacturing plant and presenting it a manner that assures the receiving party understands the information usually requires one or two professionals 4 to 6 weeks. Using the Tech Transfer Tool to semi-automatically prepare a recipe for each step which then fully-automatically prepares bills of material, parameter tables, process flow diagrams, reactor fill volumes, and IPC test lists the subject matter experts need spend a week or less. We expect that the tool will save 3 to 5 weeks for each transfer.

Not only do the experts spend less time collating and presenting the process information, but the receiving parties get the information in formats useful for the process engineer, the plant scheduler, the analytical chemist, the quality assurance manager, and the materials manager. Because the information is presented in multiple formats, the subject matter experts are much less likely to leave out key information or fail to recognize errors. An error in communicating the correct value of a parameter could mean that a process validation would have to be repeated, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and a delay in the commercial launch of a new product which could cost millions of dollars.