Research and Development - Formula Management software

Chemical manufacturers and process manufacturers produce new formulas and recipes or make changes to existing formulas and recipes on a regular basis. VicinityChem is formula management software that assists the product development of formulas. This process starts with marketing and continues through commercialization and helps reduce the time to market.  Formulas can be built from an existing formula or from scratch. Test batches can be tracked and feedback provided all the way to full production rollout. VicinityChem is easy to use and is a comprehensive recipe management system. 

Chemical Lab Calculations

During the R&D process, do you have industry- or company-specific calculations you perform based on raw material physical properties? If so, do you have chemical analysis software integrated into your ERP system?

Integrating lab calculations and production information into product development saves time and reduces the likelihood of error. While the research chemist is building a formula, the user-defined formula calculation is automatically generated. As chemicals are added or modified, the values are recalculated immediately. No more keeping a formula in one place for production and another place for R&D.

  • Real-time, user definable lab calculations automatically generated from any master formula
  • Supply physical property values for raw materials or intermediates and the system will use these values in the formula lab calculations
  • Connect physical property data from external sources and databases to reduce data entry
  • Include calculated intermediate values in a parent calculation. This handles multi-level lab calculations in our formula management software
  • Include lab calculations on Product Specification Sheets, SDS, or batch tickets

Costing of a Formula Is Easy

What steps do you go through to calculate the cost of a new formula during the R&D process?

A key part of R&D for a process manufacturer is providing an anticipated cost of the developing formula.  Have the ability to use the latest costs of materials as well as experimental items not yet in inventory and add labor and overhead factors for an up-to-date production cost with no additional effort.

  • Chemical costs are updated directly from purchasing, eliminating the need to update manually
  • The component cost roll-up report provides detailed costing for materials, packaging, labor, and overhead
  • Supports multi-level intermediates calculating the cost of each intermediate and then apply those to the salable finished good
  • Experimental raw materials are supported so items do not have to exist in the master inventory database to be used in the formula management software

Support for Formula Versioning

Can your system track different version of the same formula, or do you have to create a new formula to maintain the history of previous versions?

As a chemical company changes their formulas, they often want to see the previous versions to determine what was changed, what was the result of these changes, and sometimes revert back to a previous version. VicinityChem delivers functionality to manage old formulas, newly commercialized formulas as well as experimental formulas for process manufacturers, specifically chemical companies.

  • Formulas are tracked by user definable version
  • A new version of a formula can be created from an existing version making data entry very simple
  • Supports inactive or experimental formula versions. This allows R&D to work on a new version without the fear that it will get into production
  • Older versions can be archived so they do not appear on reports or lookups. These are not deleted so you can unarchive a version to bring it back into the standard queries

Where-Used Report

If a chemical changes or is no longer available, how do you find all the formulas, intermediates, and finished goods that will be affected by this change?

From time to time, chemicals become too expensive or no longer available.  Chemical manufactures have to determine what impact that will have on the existing product lines. Having the ability to identify all products made from that ingredient as well as all products that are made from that intermediate is important to understanding the impact of the change.

  • Query all formulas, intermediates, or finished products that include a specific item
  • Analyze the financial impact of a change of price of a chemical or a potential substitution prior to experiencing the change
  • Determine how many items are affected by the change. The increase in price may be less than the effort to implement a substitution

Substitute Items for a Range of Produced Chemicals

If you needed to replace one chemical with another in your existing system, how would you do it?

Changes to chemical ingredients happen from time to time. This change can be very time consuming if there are a number of formulas or levels of formula intermediates. A tool that can process this change can save a great deal of time and reduce the likelihood of error. With VicinityChem you can select a chemical to replace and substitute this item for one, many or all formulas.

  • Substitute chemicals for one or more formulas from a single screen
  • Support different concentrations of the new chemical to the old and resize the resulting formula if desired
  • Generate new formula versions with the chemical substitution preserving the history of old versions