“You can’t improve what you can’t measure” – Management Guru Peter Drucker.
Research labs are no strangers to measurement – indeed, they are designed to measure inputs, outcomes and results, using some of the most advanced instruments in the world. But are today’s labs missing out on efficiency gains through lack of visibility of resource utilization within the lab itself?
A laboratory booking system monitors and manages a lab’s resources including booking instruments, analyzing data and planning experiments. It is an important tool that not only improves a lab’s efficiency and reduces costs but also provides useful information when applying for and planning future investments. Many labs are already realizing the benefits of a lab management system and the global laboratory information management system (LIMS) market is growing quickly, valued at $530 million in 2018 and expected to reach $750 million by the end of 2024. Clustermarket is a lab management system that facilitates this process and could increase your organization’s productivity and performance.
Efficiently manage your labs
Labs contain a wide range of expensive instruments which are often in high demand, resulting in bottlenecks while researchers wait for access to a piece of equipment essential to the next stage of their experiment. A system that manages the booking of these instruments can significantly reduce waiting time, enabling researchers to check availability and schedule experiments more efficiently. It also reduces the dead time of an instrument, identifying under-utilized resources which can then be opened up for use by other departments, and allowing maintenance and cleaning to be scheduled during quiet periods. This increases the cost-effectiveness of individual instruments and improves inter-departmental collaboration, thus increasing the efficiency of an organization as a whole.
Access to shared resources is key to the success of many laboratories, providing advanced technologies and scientific and technical expertise as a shared resource to improve access and increase efficiency. Many organizations, including the National Institute of Health (NIH), invest significant sums to provide combined core facilities for their researchers, and this consolidation has been shown to enhance efficiency and increase the quality of research infrastructure. Efficient management of these combined facilities and the laboratory equipment and instruments they contain is essential, and an effective lab booking system can help to achieve this.
Reduce administration, improve access
As well as saving time by optimizing the use of equipment, a lab booking system also reduces the time spent managing access to this equipment. Scheduling bookings, ensuring people have the correct levels of access and have received sufficient training can all be automated using laboratory booking software, reducing the time scientists spend organizing this. If you add up the time taken for a series of small administration tasks, repeated multiple times a day, this quickly accumulates. For example: if the average lab manager spent 15 minutes setting up access for each user across an organization of even just 100 employees, cutting this to five minutes would save two working days of useful time. This time saving can be extrapolated across all equipment, introducing a significant saving throughout the organization.
The saved time could be spent undertaking important research so any way to reduce administration is an obvious way to increase output. Alison McDonald of Edinburgh University BioImaging agreed:
“I never realized how much time I’ve been spending on taking care of the admin work myself before I started using Clustermarket. The system saved me a lot of time.”
In organizations where resources are shared across multiple departments, using a lab booking system is also a straightforward way of tracking use and ensuring each department is accurately charged for their usage. Collating this information manually would require several hours a month and could easily lead to errors, whereas a booking platform provides up-to-date information which can be downloaded immediately.
Provide evidence to support investment
Having access to the latest technology is essential to drive innovation, however it often comes with at a significant cost. Restricted budgets mean that demand for investment from multiple areas of an organization must be prioritized. A laboratory management system accumulates evidence of demand for different instruments, helping lab managers decide the most necessary and effective areas to allocate funds.
This data also provides important evidence to justify grant funding, demonstrating how the money has been spent and how this has advanced the research. This is essential evidence for securing future funding and can support new funding applications by demonstrating how additional investment could help improve efficiency and research outputs.
It’s clear that a lab management system can increase the efficiency of any lab and optimize its use of resources but to achieve this it must be straightforward and logical to use. Any system which lacks a user-friendly interface but doesn’t provide the necessary functionality in an easy to access, useful format will only increase inefficiency. Clustermarket is intuitive to use and can be set up in under 1 hour, making it easy to incorporate into a functioning lab. Why not arrange a demo to see how Clustermarket could reduce your admin and optimize your lab’s resources?
