GeneralHow To Prevent Unplanned Downtime In Your Lab

Downtime is an aspect shied upon by business owners and entrepreneurs in general. It directly affects productivity, which determines the returns and profits a business gets on a given day.

That said, it’s important to prevent downtime in your business premise. Suppose you run a lab. Here’s how to prevent unplanned downtime:

Regularly Assess Your Systems

Failing to assess these systems increases the chances of them breaking down unexpectedly. They might have issues you won’t notice until the last minute, affecting operations. Therefore, it’s important to assess your systems regularly.

With the assessment, you’ll ensure everything is running as it should in terms of efficiency. You’ll also identify issues in their early stages, allowing you to address them before they cause downtime.

To do this, it’d help to create a list of what to check in all your general laboratory supplies during an assessment. This list should include the equipment you use to collect, analyze, and report your data. It ensures you don’t miss checking any system that brings about unplanned downtime in the future.

Upgrade Your Equipment

Equipment tends to deteriorate in efficiency the more you use it. Most have lifespans beyond which they bring more harm than good to your business. In such situations, these tools will lag in executing processes, increasing downtime in your lab. That’s why it’s important to upgrade your equipment.

Regularly upgrading your equipment ensures you don’t work with tools beyond their lifespans. Keeping up with upgrades requires monitoring your repair practices. Regularly repairing a given tool in your lab shows that the tool requires replacing. Only a record will help you pinpoint such needs.

Upgrades also go beyond replacing when your tools have an issue. Innovators are constantly upgrading their innovations for better efficiency. It’s important to adopt such upgrades as much as possible. The upgrades bring in new technology that ensures efficiency and no unplanned downtime. 

Adopt Maintenance Management Software

Without maintenance software, there’s a probability of forgetting to maintain your lab equipment. Also, a lack of accountability becomes an issue should issues develop, yet there was a planned maintenance schedule. Failing to maintain your tools as needed increases their chances of breaking down unexpectedly, causing downtime. Hence, it’s important to practice regular maintenance. Maintenance software will help you do this.

The software allows you to schedule maintenance routines. You’ll allocate dates, detailing who’s responsible for the maintenance. Doing so ensures accountability—no one will claim they didn’t know it was their role to execute a maintenance schedule. The software will also send reminders to those responsible before the due date to remind them of the maintenance activity. The reminders eliminate forgetting, which increases the possibility of downtime due to equipment failure.

Some maintenance software is advanced such that they monitor your systems for inefficiencies. Should they identify a change in the functionality of your systems, they’ll alert you so you check it out. This approach is known as predictive maintenance. These tools also allow your workers to submit maintenance requests for the tools they use to fulfill their responsibilities.

As you adopt this software, finding an ideal provider is important. It’s the only way to get value for your money with this investment.

Properly Store Your Equipment

Storage is an important aspect of any laboratory. It ensures all your tools for collection and analysis are always in optimum condition. Failure in this would entail a possibility of your glass jars breaking due to a thinned surface caused by improper storage. You’d need to acquire new resources, which might take time if you hadn’t planned for such events. The result is downtime as your workers wait for you to restock the damaged items. It isn’t good for business.

Therefore, ensure you store all your resources in the recommended environments by their manufacturers. You’ll increase their lifespan, reducing the possibility of them breaking down and causing downtime unexpectedly.

Train Your Team

As an entrepreneur, you have a team of workers that help you run your lab. In most cases, they’re the ones who often interact with your systems. Therefore, your team greatly contributes to the efficiency of your lab. An under-trained team won’t use your systems as they should. They might overwork or under-utilize them, leading to unexpected downtime. Overworking the tools will cause them to fail while under-utilizing them makes them do less than they’re supposed to do. Therefore, train your team.

Training your team involves teaching them how to use each of your tools to the maximum. It ensures they use the tools for their purpose without damaging them in the process. The training should also entail training them on the workings of the tools. Doing so enables them to identify issues as they fulfill their roles in your lab. The identification allows them to address issues as early as possible.

It’d help to have regular training sessions to keep them on their toes. Also, should you buy a new tool, ensure you train them on its use. It ensures your workers use the tool correctly without leading to its detriment.

Conclusion

This article has established the negative effects of downtime in a business. It has guided you in preventing unplanned downtime in your lab. Consider implementing this guide in your lab to ensure efficiency in your operations.