Imagine showing up to work on Monday morning only to find that all of your work for the last year has been erased by a malfunctioning freezer. Now, imagine that you had also started monitoring some equipment in your lab, but had decided that the malfunctioning freezer wasn’t quite important enough to justify the expense of monitoring it. That would be a painful moment.
With the advent of Smart Lab technologies, equipment and environmental monitoring are well within reach of virtually every laboratory, from research to clinical. The conversation usually starts with concerns about ‘what would happen if…’ and inevitably touches on which pieces are the highest priority. It’s a completely understandable approach that allows teams to monitor their most important assets, often those containing valuable samples or reagents, for example. However, that strategy leaves a lot to chance and can have dire consequences if you place your bets incorrectly.
Rather than monitoring some pieces of equipment and not others, the better bet is comprehensive monitoring. This strategy gives teams visibility into the health of all of the equipment in the lab or production facility, while also providing higher-level benefits. With access to real-time and historical data from a monitoring system, teams can extract layers of value and support their operational goals. For example:
Every lab contains invaluable samples, expensive reagents, and/or years worth of research, which in many cases can not be replaced. So the question is whether it makes sense to leave the safety of these assets to chance events -- whether human error or grid-scale issues -- or whether it’s time to leverage Smart Lab technologies for peace of mind and operational advantage? For those focused on developing new therapies and materials, or other critical work, the stakes are too high to justify a gamble.