Production Planner & Cost Forecaster
Month-by-month projection of cages, per-diem cost and breeders, checked against your IACUC protocol's approved number. Quantitative answers to grant-budget questions.
Available on Lab Pro ($79/mo billed yearly)
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 the breeders needed from cited strain defaults and your strain's litter history
- Cage demand projected day by day and shown by month
- Per-diem cost integrated against organization's cage rate
- Every number shown with its source: your colony's history or a cited default
Plan input → Plan output
Goal
Plan
Based on
- Litter size 6.2 (colony history, 14 litters)
- Pre-weaning loss 14% (default, Morello et al. 2020)
- Genotyping turnaround 7 days (your breeding defaults)
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)
- Each month's peak cage demand compared against capacity
- The first month over capacity is named, with what to change: start later, lower the count, or free cages
- Without racks on record, the plan's cage limit is used instead
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
- Animals already used plus the pups a plan would breed, checked against the approved number
- A plan that would pass the cap is left out, with how many places are left
- Approved numbers by species are used when the protocol has them
- Every planning run is recorded in the activity log
Protocol P-19-0042 · headroom
Litter-outcome-informed forecasting
The cage and time projections come from your colony's litter history once a strain has at least 5 recorded litters, and from cited defaults until then.
- Litter size from the strain's litters of the last 24 months, once there are 5
- Pre-weaning loss from weaned litters, once there are 5
- Interval between litters from each pair's consecutive litters, once there are 5 intervals
- Each plan is sized to reach its count with a probability of at least 80%
- Forecasts update automatically as new litters are recorded
Litter size · one strain's recorded litters
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
- One cost per cage per day, set in Breeding defaults
- Export to CSV for grant reports and procurement reviews
Cost by month · two plans
$3,400Plan production with the same rigor as your experiments
Production Planner is included in every Lab Pro plan.