Production Planner & Cost Forecaster
Six-month projection of cage usage, per-diem cost, and breeder count against your IACUC protocol cap. Quantitative answers to grant-budget questions.
Available on the Pro plan ($99/mo)
Breeders needed
6
Peak cages
24 /32
Per-diem
$3,400
Reverse-planning, not bottom-up estimation
Most software lets you log animals and watch the per-diem bill grow. The Production Planner runs in reverse. Tell it the experimental target, and it computes the breeders, cages, and cost needed to hit it.
- Specify target animal count, genotype, sex, and target-ready date
- Specify the IACUC protocol the animals will be assigned to
- Planner computes minimum breeder count using strain priors and observed pair productivity
- Cage demand projected weekly across the breeding window
- Per-diem cost integrated against organization's cage rate
- Sensitivity analysis surfaces which input drives the forecast most
Plan input → Plan output
Goal
Plan
Sensitivity
Hardware-aware capacity
The planner knows what racks you own. It compares projected cage demand against your hardware entitlement and flags when peak demand exceeds physical capacity, well before the cages are needed.
- Cage capacity sourced from your purchased rack hardware (the entitlement model)
- Peak-week cage demand compared against capacity, with margin
- Capacity overflow surfaces options: phase the breeding, purchase additional racks, or relax the timeline
- Direct link to ConductScience rack catalog when additional capacity is needed
- Per-rack utilization shown on the dashboard so you can rebalance before peak
Rack utilization · 4 racks · 32 cages total
Total: 24 / 32 cages
8 cages headroom · sufficient ✓
Protocol-approved-count enforcement
The planner reads your IACUC protocol's approved animal count and refuses to suggest plans that exceed it. If the goal cannot be reached within the protocol cap, the planner says so explicitly.
- Approved-count cap pulled directly from the linked Protocol record
- Peak occupancy projected against the cap, with margin shown
- When goal exceeds cap, planner surfaces options: amend protocol, split across protocols, reduce target
- Multi-protocol allocation supported when animals are split across active protocols
- Audit trail of every planning run kept for IACUC inspection
Protocol P-19-0042 · headroom
Litter-outcome-informed forecasting
The cage and time projections come from your colony's actual litter history, not strain-handbook averages. A pair that consistently produces 8-pup litters is modeled differently from one averaging 5.
- Per-pair litter-size posterior estimated from history with strain prior
- Per-pair sex-ratio posterior estimated from history
- Per-pair genotype-yield posterior estimated from observed Mendelian transmission
- Forecast intervals shown alongside point estimates (95% CI by default)
- Forecasts update automatically as new litters are recorded
Posterior · pair B-32 litter size
Cost forecast that pairs with grants
Every plan has a budget. The planner outputs total per-diem cost across the breeding window, plus a projection by month so you can map it against grant disbursements or quarterly budgets.
- Total per-diem cost across the full breeding window
- Monthly cost breakdown for budget reconciliation
- Per-strain cost when running multiple parallel projects
- Configurable per-diem rates per cage type and per-organization
- Export to CSV for grant reports and procurement reviews
6-month cost · by strain
$3,400Plan production with the same rigor as your experiments
Production Planner is included in every Pro plan.