Case Study – Lab Manager
Meet Chris Frost (DLM), Lab Manager and Emily Schmidt, CEO of Perfect Botanicals.
Perfect Botanicals is well known for producing the highest quality product in their rapidly growing industry. The growing demand for their products is greatly increasing loss percentages due to unpredicted and unplanned downtime. See how Chris and Emily embraced a new technology to reduce their production losses to near zero and promote a culture of safety at Perfect Botanicals.
As Lab Manager, Chris’s primary responsibilities are:
- Utilize his managerial skills and knowledge of safety and lab procedures to ensure the laboratories operate smoothly.
- Ensuring there are always clear safety guidelines, arranging safety training and promoting a clean, organized and safe place to work.
- Maintains laboratory equipment performance by establishing quality standards; developing operations, quality, and troubleshooting procedures; ensuring staff compliance; certifying equipment performance; arranging equipment replacement, service, and repair.
Due to an equipment failure, Chris had the unpleasant task of informing his boss they will lose processing capacity for three days, costing Perfect Botanicals over $40,000 of lost production.
The equipment failure was the third failure causing interruptions in production year to date, frustrating the CEO of Perfect Botanicals.
Chris called in Adrian Devin, a laboratory equipment specialist to arrange expedited repair of the failed equipment and to consult best practices to reduce failures.
Adrian informed Chris that nearly all equipment failure is preventable through scheduled preventive or predictive maintenance and the equipment failure casing the loss of production would have been avoided had the manufacturer’s suggested maintenance was followed.
Adrian recommended Chris consider using LabAide, a comprehensive Maintenance and Safety portal for all the lab’s appliance assets that will disrupt production in the event of a failure.
With LabAide, Chris can:
- Establish an inventory of all critical equipment.
- Assign stewardship of the equipment to designated lab staff.
- Enter his staff into separate Groups with unique group policies.
- Establish maintenance and safety protocols for all equipment based on manufacturer’s requirements.
- Set-up recurring alerts for required maintenance and safety activities.
- Instantly view on his dashboard all assets and status in or out of compliance.
- Download reports for record keeping.
- View history of all assets and evaluate any need of adjustment to maintenance and safety protocols.
Chris entered his staff as Members in LabAide and assigned specific Members stewardship of specific appliance assets. In addition, Chris arranged to have an outside preventive maintenance service entered into LabAIde to be alerted to carry out and log the preventive maintenance services they are contracted to perform.
Chris began a free trial of LabAide and began entering the critical process equipment into the LabAIde portal. LabAide Recommends entering alerts based on the manufacturer’s recommendations for safety and maintenance.
As Chris entered the appliance assets into LabAide, he realized his company was not following most of the maintenance and safety recommendations for their vital equipment.
As initially entered, 74 of the 81 critical assets were out of compliance with the manufacturer’s maintenance and safety recommendations. To Chris, that means there are 81 strong possible failures that are preventable.
Using LabAide, Chris set text and e-mail alerts for his staff to perform maintenance and safety activities based on manufacturer’s recommendations, good lab practices and his organizations policies including; change fluids, periodically, clean, adjust, check operating temperatures, Check for leaks, proper installations, connections, amperage draw and other safety and maintenance activities.
Chris had his staff enter the asset records for the assets under their stewardship.
The LabAide Asset records details the exact location of the asset with a photo, so any user with access to the record can easily locate the asset. If staff is reassigned, the asset can be assigned to a new steward of the asset seamlessly. The new steward of the asset can see all details of the asset, the asset history including maintenance and safety record, along with upcoming scheduled alerts for activities.
Chris’s team worked diligently to answer their e-mail and text alerts to perform the required maintenance and safety checks on the assets under their stewardship.
Over the next two months, Chris was able to bring all of the company’s critical process equipment up to date with manufacturer’s recommended maintenance & safety requirements. Alerts were scheduled for ongoing maintenance and safety evaluations for all equipment through LabAide. New equipment brought into the facility is immediately entered into LabAide with alerts for maintenance and safety activities
While there is no 100% guarantee equipment won’t fail with the most diligent preventive maintenance efforts, Chris and Emily are confident they are managing their equipment properly and have established a culture of safety at Perfect Botanicals.