0112. Safeguarding Scientific Progress with a Maintenance Master Plan.

- Highlight the critical importance of a robust asset management strategy.
- Discuss maintenance scheduling, coordination, and the power of clear communication.
- Emphasize post-service rituals to ensure optimal equipment performance.
- Share personal experiences and lessons learned from overlooked maintenance.
- Advocate for dialogue among technicians, scientists, and coordinators.
- Dive deep into mastering equipment maintenance for lab resilience and efficiency.

Thank you to our sponsor, Sigma Lab Consulting

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1. R&D Operational Excellence Scorecard

• Evaluate your R&D processes and uncover opportunities for improvement. R&D Operational Excellence Scorecard

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• Measure your clinical operations' effectiveness and identify growth areas. Clinical Operations Operational Excellence Scorecard

3. Facility Readiness Scorecard

• Assess your facility's readiness and discover strategic insights. Facility Readiness Scorecard

4. Maintenance Efficiency Scorecard

• Optimize your maintenance processes for peak efficiency. Maintenance Efficiency Scorecard

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Transcript

Oscar Gonzalez: 0:00

It's almost like that little Spider-Man cartoon where, like the three Spider-Man's are pointing at each other like wait, you're supposed to do something, and it's not a really good feeling when people are coming into your space and you don't actually know what is going on. Welcome to Lean by Design Podcast. I'm your host, Oscar Gonzalez, alongside my co-host, Lawrence Wong. We are former MBA classmates turned business partners with over 25 years of combined experience in life sciences, from R&D through manufacturing. Our experiences have shed light into the complex, ever-changing challenges experienced by this industry and many others. We took a risk quit our six-figure paying jobs in Boston Biotech and Pharma to start Sigma Lab Consulting Journey with us as we explore the relationship between people and workflow design, the goal To learn, inspire and deliver practical tips to navigate these ever-changing challenges. Stick with us and learn to work smarter, not harder, and be lean by design.

Oscar Gonzalez: 1:08

How would you feel if you learned that unplanned equipment downtime can cost companies upwards of $260,000 per hour, according to some estimates. This alarming figure serves as the backdrop for our conversation today about the intricacies of equipment maintenance and servicing in the life science industries. The dialogue goes beyond merely troubleshooting mechanical issues to explore the overarching system of communication, responsibility and planning that constitute a well-rounded approach to equipment care. The discussion illuminates the collaborative roles that equipment owners and service teams plays, each with distinct responsibilities, but united in a quest for operational excellence. And welcome back to another episode of Lean by Design Podcast, Oscar Gonzalez here, my co-host, and Biotech manufacturing facilities extraordinaire. So we get into a facility giant. You know, when I think about facilities I understand there's a lot of facilities that can either manufacture compounds or drugs or what have you, and in my mind, for some reason, I get this idea of like a giant brewery that just has giant tanks all over the place.

Oscar Gonzalez: 2:37

That's pretty accurate. So you know. Either way, I think this is going to be good for a lot of our listeners. But you know, with all that equipment, you know who's really responsible for managing that. How do they go through that equipment and go OK. Well, this is what we need to do, because I know very well the inherent risk that if something goes wrong, what that does to a full production line, you know, if it's contamination, if it's pieces broken, what that does to have to shut down to repair, to fix. How do folks now go through all the equipment that they have you know that now, and some of these large organizations is in the thousands and make those preventative measures and be able to schedule the right work that needs to be done in the right place? I mean, what do we do?

Lawrence Wong: 3:36

Yeah, so usually you'll have what they call an asset management function, and so what that function does is they're responsible for any of the maintenance and calibration of your systems, equipment instruments that either fall into like a utility category, or maybe it's something to do with HVAC, it might be something on the manufacturing floor, it might be something in the lab, but, depending on the type of work, there are specific, I would say, service providers that are responsible for providing that care.

Lawrence Wong: 4:11

So for the purposes of you know the discussion, we'll just focus on scheduling routine events, right? So I think when you talk about non routine events that are unplanned, like the emergencies, there's usually not some sort of like blanket cokey cutter way to do things, because it really depends on the criticality of the system and the severity of the incident, right? So, as an example, if somebody is seriously hurt, obviously you know you drop everything and you go address that immediately. Versus, hey, we have a slow drip and it's like okay, well, how bad is it? And then what is leaking? If it's like the toilet, then maybe we don't address that immediately and we go do other things. Right? So it depends on the the acer criticality and the severity of the failure.

Lawrence Wong: 4:57

So when we talk about maintenance scheduling and asset management, I want to start with addressing about how things shouldn't be done, and so, oh this is a lot of most companies are going to operate out of a computerized maintenance management system, and so all that is is it's a it's sort of like a ticketing process where every month you'll have, you know, a set list of work orders that you have to address.

Lawrence Wong: 5:28

So those work orders might range in doing maintenance on a pump, right where you have to replace a seal, and might be calibrating a temperature transmitter that's a part of a freezer, and so all of these routine events they usually, you know, they usually do at the end of the month, and they'll come up maybe a couple days before the next month. But you'll get a list of things that need to get done for the next month, and so what happens is the planner will either have a meeting or you'll send an email out and say, hey, I need a bunch of availability for your equipment so I can work on it. And so if you're the owner of it.

Lawrence Wong: 6:09

you'll come back with a bunch of dates or you'll say this time works for me, this time doesn't work for me. And then that bundle of time and dates gets forwarded to the service provider. And so then they'll look at their workforce and say this either works or doesn't work. And so this happens a couple more times until somebody waits at the last minute to schedule the work and it's due in a couple days, and so that's just for one job. You can imagine that, if you have hundreds of work orders, how infuriating this is, because you waste so much time just with emails and meetings and getting dates and times.

Lawrence Wong: 6:49

And so you know what do you do as a planner to improve this process and make it a little bit less painful? It begins with setting expectations and the communicating with the stakeholders, right, and so I'm not. I'm not talking about from job to job, but overall strategy. So suppose you have a lab group that has a very front-loaded schedule in the morning, right? So they do most of their experiments in the morning. In that case, the afternoons are probably the best time to do the maintenance, because there's less activity going on. Another scenario might be hey, this job impacts your most critical instrument and so you're not going to have this available for you while we work on it. It probably makes more sense to assign the most experienced technicians to services so you can get it back to the owner in time, right, you don't want to be assigning a bunch of rookies to services thing, because if something goes wrong then there's a lot more impact that might that will create on your schedule.

Oscar Gonzalez: 7:54

Are these internal people that we're talking about here, or from the vendor?

Lawrence Wong: 7:59

It depends. So your calibration, depending on the type of equipment, might be internal or might be external. I find that if you are dealing with external partners are usually a little bit more accommodating than your internal partners, just because when you bring things in house, there's just a lot more responsibility and a Lot more equipment that they have to take ownership of, like as they're servicing them right, whereas a service provider it's like you know, this specific make-and-model is serviced by like one company, versus you know this internal team that has to service, like, hundreds of different types of equipment and instruments.

Oscar Gonzalez: 8:42

And do you see the level of complexity changing? So it's usually these more specialized, complex items are not handled by the Folks that are working in the organization. Is that? Is that a fair statement to make?

Lawrence Wong: 8:55

Yeah.

Lawrence Wong: 8:55

So I would say for the most part you're, the more complicated the instruments are, the less likely it is to be owned by an internal team, just because a lot of these vendors have proprietary software or you might have to have a certain level of access to Alter some of the configurations within the instrument to be able to do certain testing.

Lawrence Wong: 9:16

Now, I believe the opposite may be true for the maintenance part of it, where if you have a very complicated water system Throughout the building, that's usually not fabricated by one vendor.

Lawrence Wong: 9:27

It's usually what we call a stick bill system, and so that usually means it's it's a a mixture of all different components from different vendors, like you may have a Me from somebody else and you might have a valve made from somebody else, so in that case those components tend to be like individually they're not as complicated, but the system as a whole is complicated, right? So if you can think of a water system, when you have to replace things like gaskets or o-rings, you have to drain the entire system, and so you're not gonna have a vendor that does that work. It's gonna be the internal team that's familiar with the automation sequences and like how to go about locking things out and draining the system, so that gets a little bit more complicated, like you have to prep, you have to, you have to essentially do all the prep work prior to anyone coming in to fix or replace a certain piece exactly and and not to say that you don't have to do that for instruments.

Lawrence Wong: 10:22

You still have to do that in some cases, right? So a good example is, if you have some sort of like the caustic tank, you know that has a very, I would say, dangerous or potential Potentially dangerous solution, you might want to outsource that to maybe a clean harbors or some other company that's more familiar with handling those types of solutions. From a scheduling perspective, you'll usually have like a like a high-level scheduler that assigns like time slots to when things are are gonna be serviced and then, Once that happens, there's an assignment that happens, right. So the work order record will have somebody that's assigned to it and that means that there's an individual who is the lead for that job. And that's not to say that you know it's just one person working on the job. It's just that they are the person responsible for communicating any delays and and sort of leading the execution of the job. They're the project manager, but they're also the ones that are executing the job as well, right, like they're using certain tools and standards to kind of execute on whatever the job scope is.

Lawrence Wong: 11:25

Now, when you look at stuff that is maintained externally by like a service provider. That may be through a vendors or supply that's outside the company. I've seen it handled a number of ways. It usually comes down to like whoever owns the contract, and that may be the actual equipment owner, or it may be the facilities team that owns the contract, but whoever is owning the contract is responsible for overseeing those resources that are coming in to service the equipment and it. There's a bunch of liability that happens If that's not structured correctly, right? So if you don't own the contract but you're giving the responsibility to somebody else, they may not be familiar with the terms of the contract.

Lawrence Wong: 12:12

So I've seen this happen where facilities will own a contract and then they'll say to like the lab owner hey, like you know, we pay for the contract and you can schedule so and so to come in and work on the same of unexpected findings or delays is Extremely important, right? Nobody wants to hear that the system or the equipment being handed back to them it's gonna be delayed a couple hours because you have all these experiments and all these production activities that are scheduled around. Are you completing your job on time? And so I've seen instances where People get close to the end of the job and they go oh yeah, we need to replace the seal, but we won't have it for a couple days and it's like why don't you tell me that earlier? Because I have a group of people that are.

Oscar Gonzalez: 12:51

Waiting to show.

Lawrence Wong: 12:52

I don't even show up to do half exactly right and and that that does a couple things. One, it and not only puts pressure on your schedule for completing those activities that you had planned, but it also creates this like Sour taste in the equipment owners mouth, right where they're like why didn't you like, why didn't you tell me this earlier? Because now I have other responsibilities that I have to tend to because of this delay. Right, and I'm not saying that right, these things don't occur, but the more upfront and transparent and earlier that you can tell somebody, the more time they have to plan for an alternative strategy. If you're waiting till the very end, chances are your Equipment owner is not gonna be very happy with you and all the other jobs that you have planned for that system right.

Oscar Gonzalez: 13:43

You're listening to lean by design podcast and we'll be right back after a quick break. Do you suspect your life sciences company could do things more efficiently? Maybe you're seeing costly workflow issues or maybe the work feels more difficult to perform than necessary, affecting team or out. If any of this resonates, reach out to the team at Sigma lab consulting for a free consultation On how we can develop and launch a custom solution fit for your team. Our consultants will build a custom workflow solution for your team to reach peak efficiency. Find out more at wwwSigmaLabConsultingcom.

Lawrence Wong: 14:24

Once you've completed the job. What are the other things that people tend to miss is Ensuring the system is returned to normal. When you return it, that doesn't mean supposed to test it, right? Yeah, you're supposed to test it. That doesn't mean pack up all your things and leave and then send a phone call and go yeah, everything's all set it's. You should be Doing a quick walkthrough with the owner and doing like a quick check to make sure everything is back to normal and there's no problems before you walk away, because I've seen times where who owns that?

Oscar Gonzalez: 14:55

Who owns that? Should I basically tell somebody that comes in like hey, hey, like, are you gonna show me or talk me through what you did and show me that this is still working? Is that? Or should we feel that whoever comes in to run that servicing, that should be part of their process?

Lawrence Wong: 15:12

it should be whoever is coming in to do the servicing, to Communicate with whoever the owner is. Is there anything that we can do to test the system to make sure it works, because there are a number of pre-use checks that you can do on any benchtop, you know instrument there might be like a what we would call like a leak test that we do on certain tanks, or maybe you know piping to make sure there's no leaks. I've seen a bunch of times where somebody will walk away, they put water in it and they go oh it's leaking and it's like now we got to open up another work order and now I have to allocate more resources to fix it.

Lawrence Wong: 15:44

It's like I gotta call them back right if if you would have just stood there for an extra five minutes, you would have, you know, prevented the amount of Work order and documentation that is is needed to kind of address the issue. So, yeah, please remember to return the system back to normal, because nobody wants to Put in another work order just because they allocated you time to fix it anyway, because you're creating more work, right?

Oscar Gonzalez: 16:11

Right, right, right. It's like coming and changing, you know, your printer cartridge thing, taking it out, sticking it in there, closing it and going Art, it's done. Well, you know why don't you take a test page to make sure that it's actually printing ink? Yes, you know, it's obviously a more complex space that we're discussing here, but it Makes complete sense to me. You know, you take your car to the dealership. What happens? They fix it, they take it for a drive, then they come back. Yep, we're good, they don't fix it and go alright, you know, take off. And then you take off and you hear this squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak. You're like, okay, they didn't do anything.

Lawrence Wong: 16:44

Yeah, and if they are doing that like that's red flag number one is you should probably go somewhere else, because that you want to have those quality checks in place to make sure that you're not in any sort of you know one Danger to yourself. Right, because there are systems that are dangerous, and turning it over and turning it on immediately, there are a lot of risks associated with that. But there's also a business impact, right, like nobody wants to have additional delays when we've already set a time, you know this allocation of resources to perform maintenance, and so, right, you know my. My last point is really any feedback that you have During the execution of the work order should be documented so that you can make any incremental improvements to the job duration, the scope, the training, maybe the parts that you need to stock, and, and without having that feedback logged, nobody has any idea of how to make anything better, and this is why it's so important to keep these, you know, I would say, but it's both qualitative and quantitative feedback.

Lawrence Wong: 17:52

So you have, like these job durations and, like I would say, hours and and Money spent on a work order, but you also have feedback from like, hey, that technician thought that maybe the equipment wasn't handed over Properly and the area wasn't clean and you know. There are just small little things that we could improve on over time, but without them putting that in the work log, nobody has any idea on how to improve those things.

Oscar Gonzalez: 18:18

I mean, just think about the equipment and the information. And you know what happens when, when you go, when you take it to, like the you know, take your car to the garage, that that you always take it to they pull up your specs, they pull up oh, these are all the instances that we had Etc, etc. Etc. You know, I can imagine that it it's very valuable to have that information, not only for For, like, new people coming in to say, hey, you're gonna be the new owner of these systems. Here's the logs that we've had for the previous returns and they might look in there and go, wow, do you guys realize, like, in the last three years You've replaced this component three times and that's supposed to last ten years. You know, that's it. That's something that is like okay. So how how do we now affect that so that the downtime shrinks and and? And this is again one of those examples of just Seeing something and saying something, you know, not just going oh yeah, they're a place that every three years, is that normal? Or every year Is that normal? Is that something that's supposed to happen? If not, maybe we ended up with a lemon, or maybe they changed the design of the gasket that they're now putting on this piece and it's more brittle, or understanding those pieces of equipment and having that documentation is super critical to really continuing on making sure that the facilities and the equipment has very little downtime, because I can just imagine from the perspective of operations for that particular group. No one wants that stuff to be down where they can't use it.

Oscar Gonzalez: 19:58

I've been at an organization before where we had basically two very highly used pieces of equipment. One went down. The other one was a three years older version, so we weren't getting the same resolution that we had on the equipment piece that went down. I don't know where we were with yearly updates or yearly. You go get your oil change, you go get your tires rotated, you go get your tires filled in. This is the kind of stuff that you need to do when you're dealing with equipment. You need to take care of that equipment if you expect it to actually last. The reason why they give you these long durations of lifespans for these pieces of equipment and why it's very closely captured in the 10K of organizations where are the assets? How have things depreciated, et cetera, et cetera. The only way that they're going to last that long is if you actually take care of it, and the only way that you're going to ensure consistency in the product, in the testing, in the mechanisms, is to keep these systems up and running. I came from a place in academia where equipment was well, it's pretty good, ok, well, I hope we're not planning on trying to get grant money with data that is not very accurate, because none of our pipettes have been serviced in four years and some of those really and it's a very simple thing.

Oscar Gonzalez: 21:26

But a very common instrument is that pipette. And let me tell you the differences that you see in that pipette they're not always due to the types of tips that you have in there. A lot of times it is that calibration. There's some grease that needs to be applied, there's some those things. They're going up and down. Oh, my thing squeaks. Yeah, it's no big deal and then it gets stuck and then you start sucking things into your equipment. Now you can't even use it. Yeah, it's like, oh, yeah, I've had this noise going on in my car and then, all of a sudden, pow, you're stranded in the middle of the interstate.

Lawrence Wong: 21:59

Right, and I think, from a scheduler perspective too, and I'm saying that the ownership completely falls on them, but having an understanding of how critical these pieces of equipment are to not just the owner, but also understanding the impact of the work that the maintenance is providing. So what is? Why are you calibrating this? What is the value of it? Once everybody is on the same page, then they understand that this activity is crucial for you to leverage any data on for your experiments or anything that is in the process that relies on that measurement. You can say that it's accurate and it's precise because of those calibration activities. But if people don't value those activities and see that as a value add, then they're not going to take it as seriously and you're going to push off maintenance. You're going to say it's not important, you're going to find ways to justify why you don't need it and you're going to start cutting corners and all that's going to result in is compromise, data and your process that you can't rely on Absolutely, absolutely.

Lawrence Wong: 23:11

We'll be right back after a quick break. Is your team constantly fighting fires? Are you struggling with productivity and think it's due to inefficiency in your operations? These challenges can be difficult to measure, but not impossible. Sigma Lab Consulting can help you define and prioritize the issues that are negatively impacting your team. We partner with stakeholders to redesign workflows so you can work more efficiently. Find out more at sigmalabconsultingcom.

Lawrence Wong: 23:43

So I want to bring one last point, and it's about if you want to improve scheduling, whether it's external or internal, you have to have a working relationship with the owner of the equipment, but also the service team.

Lawrence Wong: 24:01

I've seen too many teams be completely reliant on the system owner and just have them dictate how things should go. There are other people involved in this and it's the actual people that are servicing the equipment and the instrument. You have to consider that as well, because things happen and you need to be able to have those communication channels open. If there's an improvement that they see that the system order doesn't see, they should be made aware of it. And it goes the other way around too If a technician is working on a piece of equipment and the system order has noticed maybe some abnormal findings in the last couple of days from when they were running it. You should tell the technician to be careful. This thing maybe there's some sort of dangerous part of the job that maybe you didn't consider. One of those things might be hey, this valve is leaking or this thing is really hot next to it, or something like that.

Oscar Gonzalez: 25:04

I was going to say it got hot, or it started to smell like something burning, or it smells like metal. All of a sudden something scraping itself.

Lawrence Wong: 25:12

Right, because at the end of the day, nobody wants to come into work and leave with knowing that the job was done in a poor way and nobody wants to leave hurt. Everybody wants to come in and do a good job and to go home safely. So keeping those things in mind and making sure that all parties involved are aware of what's going on will drastically improve how you not only schedule your routine work, but it makes it easier to work on those emergencies. Right, because you don't want to be building a relationship with somebody on these very high tension, high pressure jobs. You want to slowly build that relationship over time on these simple routine activities so you can have that dialogue and build and build, and build and build. And so when you face this challenge together, you're not questioning whether or not that person's capable of handling it, because you've had this relationship with them over time.

Oscar Gonzalez: 26:11

Right. It also gives you that second look at something you know, regardless of where the process improvement is, it's imperative to really develop that relationship with people that own the process or own the product or the equipment owner and those that intend to really apply a fix to it. You know, sometimes it's the same person, but oftentimes you do have to engage with external people. I mean, if I'm improving my own process, then it's my own process for something that I'm doing. But oftentimes these things that we're working on, the reason why we're working on them is because they affect multiple people and if we don't have the relationships where we can feel compelled to, you know, give them information hey, this just happened last week or hey, this happened, you know, at some other time. And you know, at least having somebody there that has the expertise to really drill down into that piece of equipment and have somebody that's there that, as the product owner, you're also speaking for everyone else that uses it. You're speaking for everyone else. You are the beacon, the connecting piece between the service contract owner, you know vendor and the organization who's using it. What's happened? What have they noticed? You know. So it's important to really understand that, because no one wants. Like you said, no one wants to go to work in biotech or science that has challenges, because there's so much we don't understand. No one wants to go into there and spend hours getting something ready and then using a piece of equipment to find out that something happened and we could have that was preventable. You know, preventable maintenance.

Oscar Gonzalez: 27:57

It's insane how often those things, those errors, do occur. You know I've had many times where I've had. You know, my protocol is six hours of preparation and then, boom, at the very end I find out that the pieces of equipment have been down for two days. No communication, no announcement, not even a piece of paper on there. It's just unplugged. Why is this unplugged? Oh, it hasn't been working. No one thought to say anything to anybody about this. You know, we have become such a society, I think, in the professional landscape, where we just wait for people to give us information. We don't seek information and we don't push information. You know, whether or not it's in the space of equipment maintenance or in the space of running projects, you have to learn to engage in a push-pull relationship with all of your stakeholders. Not any one person is going to be able to connect to dots from end to end. In any process that involves multiple stakeholders 1000% there's always something that somebody else is doing into that workflow that you have no idea about.

Lawrence Wong: 29:12

Yeah, and you may know that it exists but you don't understand the nuances of it.

Oscar Gonzalez: 29:15

You have to have those relationships.

Lawrence Wong: 29:17

Yeah, and do you? I mean, you brought up the Spider-Man meme before about, like the three Spider-Man's like pointing at each other. Yeah, you don't want that to happen. If there's a fire going on and there's a true emergency, and you don't want to be pointing fingers at different people, oh, that's your problem, that's not mine. And you want to be having three Spider-Men like saving the city, right, like all three working together knowing, hey, you take that portion.

Oscar Gonzalez: 29:43

I'll take care of this. This one's going to go notify everybody, this one's going to get a report going. Blah, blah, blah. I'll stop the bleeding, exactly, figuratively speaking. Yeah, yeah, and that's critical. Use your stakeholders, build that team. Build that team and it's not even necessarily a physical, you know, I guess you could say a formal team Build those connections. Those people are the team that you could count on, that you could talk to. That will give you that information, will give you new information.

Lawrence Wong: 30:18

Yeah, and this is a very similar theme to our previous episode is these, these, I would say, gaps or maybe bottlenecks that you see in your scheduling process? They are opportunities for anyone in those you know within that team to take ownership of driving those changes and to make it a little easier on the next job and the job after to be able to schedule these key activities across the board, and it's not just your system but everybody else's system and it it just gives you the opportunity to take responsibility for other higher level planning activities or maybe projects.

Oscar Gonzalez: 31:05

I agree. I could not agree more. It's a lot of opportunity there, a lot of coordination, but all it takes is to get started. I think some people are a little afraid of just like I don't know where to start, I don't know who's involved, I don't want to step on toes, you know. And the old added it's not my role. I think we need to start getting out of that mentality and, you know, not being in a role versus hey, yeah, you know, let me, let me help you point, let me help point you in the right direction. Or let me let's take care of this. I can show you what this looks like so that next time, if you run into it, you can solve that Again.

Oscar Gonzalez: 31:50

Just what we talked about in the last, in the last podcast episode educate folks. Don't just necessarily do things for them or do things that you know. Somebody asks you hey, can you do this? They're asking you because they know you are capable of doing it. They may not know how to do it. Form that team, form those stakeholders. Educate people. Give information. Don't just take it. We love to just take information and we hate to take the two seconds to give it.

Lawrence Wong: 32:18

Right, yeah, absolutely.

Oscar Gonzalez: 32:22

So, lawrence, been a fantastic conversation. I am. You know you got my wheels spinning. You got my wheels spinning and you know there's been more than one occasion and just for me, from the laboratory side, seeing things that just all of a sudden this is down, this is down.

Oscar Gonzalez: 32:39

You know, I've been part of organizations where their operations managers do a fantastic job of notifying people when the fix is coming, who's involved, when it's going to be fixed, and then that it has been fixed. And I think it's really that transparency that we talked about and really, you know, involving all of the stakeholders, because you don't actually know how much that piece of equipment or machinery etc needs to be used in the next couple of days. There may be some big experiments that you're not accounting for. I need to make sure that you're giving people the right amount of time if they need to connect with another sister organization or, oh, I know they have another one on the sixth floor I'll see what they're scheduling so I can go upstairs and use that piece of equipment while this one's being fixed. You know it's all this transparency, education, you know that's really key to. You know, working smarter.

Lawrence Wong: 33:32

Yeah, I think you know you're absolutely right. And whether you're in a lab setting or a manufacturing setting, the planner acts as a project manager, not only for managing the work that is being performed you know, from a service context but also from the point of view of you're orchestrating the relationships between these different groups and having to complete the maintenance on time, you know, within the specified duration and ensuring the system gets turned over, you know, back to normal state. So a lot of similarities, whether you know you're in either setting, and it just shares a lot of parallels with managing projects as well.

Oscar Gonzalez: 34:15

Yeah, and I'm going to keep using that example of a car no one is more upset when you go in for an oil change and they tell you that your tires are flat. Yeah, I've heard so many times oh, I go in there for this and they tell me that how upset would you be if you went in for an oil change and they didn't tell you any of that? That's when that's a problem.

Lawrence Wong: 34:41

Yeah, yeah.

Oscar Gonzalez: 34:46

Lawrence, thanks again and to those listening, we appreciate you following and be sure to share. Hit the like button, share the podcast out there. We're going to keep coming out with new episodes, really bringing you guys a lot of experience from Lawrence and for myself what we're seeing in the industry and how we can improve the processes to really make science and biotech more efficient and more lean.

Lawrence Wong: 35:13

Yeah, awesome. And as always, you know, work smarter before you work harder, that's right.

Oscar Gonzalez: 35:27

We had some critical learnings in today's discussions. Firstly, the importance of clearly dividing responsibilities, which cannot be overstated. Knowing who is accountable for which aspect of equipment maintenance, whether it's the end users or the servicing teams truly sets the groundwork for effective action. This helps us avoid any overlap or gaps that could lead to inefficiencies or even failures. When we discuss proactive maintenance, the concept here is simple but powerful. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Scheduling, regular checkups and maintenance activities can save a significant amount of time, effort and resources compared to the reactive approaches that only deal with issues as they arise. Regarding communications, this involves more than just giving orders or sending emails. It's about fostering interdisciplinary dialogue between different departments, maintenance teams and vendors. Without clear communications, even the most well-planned maintenance activities can come to a standstill, leading to avoidable delays and expenses.

Oscar Gonzalez: 36:29

You can't forget about documentation. It seems tedious, but keeping meticulous records of equipment history, repairs and inspections creates a valuable repository of information. It not only helps during troubleshooting, but also makes it easier for future maintenance of activities to be carried out more efficiently. Lastly but not least, a holistic approach to equipment care is essential. We're not just talking about nuts and bolts here. We're discussing the integration of processes, peoples and technology. When these elements work cohesively, it sets the stage for operational excellence. It transcends individual tasks or departments. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to leave us a review, like and share on Spotify, apple and Google Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, and if you're interested in being on the show or becoming a sponsor, send us a message at Lean by Design, at SigmaLabConsultingcom.