Comprehensive equipment maintenance service for life science and pharmaceutical laboratories promises to improve productivity, reduce downtime, and cut service costs
Agilent Technologies has introduced its Laboratory Resource Management (LRM) service for life science and pharmaceutical laboratories.
Through this service, Agilent places its engineers on site to regularly handle maintenance, repair, regulatory compliance, workflow consulting and reporting services for all chromatography and other instrumentation, regardless of equipment vendor.
For large laboratories, this service promises to increase efficiency and productivity, simplify administration and provide operational consistency, while reducing total service costs.
Agilent's LRM service programme has been shown to reduce instrument downtime by a factor of four compared with standard support agreements with individual vendors, it claims.
Expert, on-site engineers can respond more promptly and are familiar with a customer's laboratory.
The LRM service also minimises the time customer employees spend handling instrument failures by reducing time spent troubleshooting, reporting failures, escorting and familiarising engineers, and re-qualifying failed modules.
In one typical account, this time dropped from 8.5 employee hours per failure to only 75 minutes.
Laboratory management and procurement departments are tasked with reducing lab operation costs while keeping productivity high.
Agilent LRM enables them to do so by improving engineer utilisation, standardising maintenance protocols, reducing the number of service contractors engaged, and allowing customers to define and pay for the exact level of service they need.
Agilent can support most common laboratory instrumentation, regardless of vendor, and can further simplify compliance activities by standardising instrument qualification and reporting.
"Our customers are asking us to help them optimise their processes, improve productivity, ensure consistency and reduce their service costs," said May Van, vice president and general manager of Agilent's consumables and service solutions business.
"Agilent LRM can improve lab productivity by reducing administration and downtime, and it can reduce the total costs of running a lab by 15% or more.
"This helps customers meet their cost-saving mandates while enhancing productivity and maintaining compliance."
