While many Massachusetts companies officially opened their doors this week after temporarily closing over COVID-19 concerns, one Boston-area biotech company has developed a tool to keep workers safe as the pandemic persists.
“I was thinking, '‘While we’re going to leave [the office], that means at some point we’re going to come back. How does that work?’” said Nic Betts, head of IT and facilities at Obsidian Therapeutics.
Betts has developed open-source software called SWFT, which takes scheduling data from Excel spreadsheets and maps it out, allowing employees to coordinate when they’re going to be in and out of the office. More than 20 companies now use the free tool, and an updated version of the software is set to launch in early June — just in time to help workers across the nation adjust to their new office environments as pandemic restrictions lift. Obsidian is partnering with the Boston-based TrnDigital consulting company to develop SWFT 2.0 for free.
“We’re all in this situation together,” Betts said. “If these tools can help other companies accelerate their ability to get back to the workplace in a safe way, then it benefits us all.”
Obsidian sent all its non-essential employees home in early March. For the 40 scientists who still needed to work out of the lab, the company had launched a COVID-19 task force in February that resulted in a number of new procedures to ensure their safety. These procedures also went into effect in early March.
The company rented cars for the scientists, so they could get to the Cambridge office without public transportation. The biotech company ensured all data generated from experiments was stored in the Microsoft Ignite cloud, which allowed scientists to conduct their analysis at home. Obsidian also expanded working hours to 6 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. seven days a week, and divided the days into four shifts.
To figure out how to maximize the space in the office for the essential scientists, Betts analyzed the area available and determined that, following the six-foot social distancing guidelines, the lab safely held 18 people. He talked with scientists and project managers about how they worked in the office, and then drew a map of how everyone moved around the space. Betts input the drawing into Microsoft Visio diagramming software, which helped Obsidian divide the lab into eight separate workspaces and three rooms.
The company moved commonly used tools like hotbeds and centrifuges to opposite ends of the updated space, so as to limit contact among workers. Every day at 5 a.m. the lab manager also distributes fresh lab supplies to the designated space, rather than simply stocking items in a single central location. Once the lab space was maximized, Betts focused on figuring out who should work when.
He had scientists enter their desired work shifts into an Excel spreadsheet, and used Microsoft’s Power BI business analytics software to aggregate their schedules into a single dashboard view. With this tool, employees can see when there might be potential capacity issues, and resolve shift disputes among themselves. SWFT can also be used for contact tracing, since it tracks who could have been exposed to one another.
“If you write software and just push it out, you don’t get the use,” Betts said. “By having the scientists involved in every aspect of this, we’ve seen great adoption.”
