Life Sciences Benchmarking Program welcomes new participants and shares key insights

Linesight's Life Sciences Benchmarking Program is proud to announce the addition of five new organizations —Catalent, Charles River, Merck Millipore, Johnson & Johnson, and UCB—to its forum who joined over the course of 2024.

With this expansion, the program now includes participants from 23 leading organisations, underscoring its growing reputation as a hub for collaboration and excellence in the life sciences sector.

Driving excellence through benchmarking

The program’s mission is to help life sciences clients optimise their developments by benchmarking against world-leading industry standards. By offering actionable intelligence, sectoral outlooks, and cost and schedule insights for a variety of capital project types, the program fosters innovation and raises industry standards globally.

Throughout 2024, the program has expanded its scope to provide even deeper insights into current trends and challenges in the life sciences industry. With the addition of new participants, the program continues to enhance its ability to drive innovation and support clients in delivering world-class solutions with regards to capital project delivery

Comprehensive database of project insights

The forum’s benchmarking database now includes data from 235 capital projects, ranging across various cost categories:

• <€25 million: 63 projects
• €25–50 million: 37 projects
• €50–100 million: 43 projects
• €100–250 million: 51 projects
• €250–500 million: 27 projects
• €500–1,000 million: 9 projects
• >€1,000 million: 5 projects

Key insight - The impact of detailed design on construction times

One of the recent findings from the program highlights the critical correlation between detailed design time and construction time, particularly in fit-out projects. Drawing on data from 45 projects across participating companies, the analysis shows that allocating more time to detailed design significantly reduces construction duration, which often involve added complexities due to existing building constraints.

The findings reveal that:

• Fit-out projects see a stronger correlation between detailed design and construction time than new-build projects.
• Investing in thorough planning during the detailed design phase for fit-out projects can streamline the overall construction process, driving efficiency and reducing delays.
• The insights are based on a robust dataset of projects with complete schedule data. The analysis focuses on the proportion of total project time spent on detailed design versus construction across multiple life sciences facility types.

Methodology

Linesight data analysis teams act as custodians of the cost and schedule data only, the ownership of the data resides with the respective pharmaceutical company. The data is held on a restricted access database, ensuring that any specific information about projects is managed confidentially and Linesight ensure only anonymized data and trends are made available via the dashboard.

This type of collaboration enables organisations to build and validate robust initial estimates backed up by relevant data, and to gain insights into the competitiveness of their construction project compared to their peers’ projects.

Looking ahead

As the forum continues to grow, we look forward to collaborating with our new and existing members to share best practices, address emerging challenges, and shape the future of the life sciences sector. Together, we aim to drive excellence, innovation, and progress across the industry.

For more information or to enhance your strategic capabilities through benchmarking, please complete the contact card at the top of this page.