4 Reasons to Use External Lab Equipment

Maybe you have been in one of these situations:

• Your old or reformed equipment doesn’t work anymore and needs to be replaced?
• Do you want to enlarge the repertoire of your analyzes?
• Your lab needs to be more efficient and better organized?

You might feel you want to acquire new equipment soon. But acquiring new equipment is not an easy task. In fact, you’d probably need to go through many steps before being able to actually use the equipment. And that is absolutely not the goal you want to achieve, am I right?

So, that is where outsourcing begins to appear as a good bargain. And if you are still wondering why you should collaborate with teams that have large equipment instead of buying them, you’d probably be interested our insight on the benefits of outsourcing your use of big lab equipment.

Avoid high costs

If you really consider all the costs that buying large equipment implies, expenses are suddenly rising. As a matter of fact, you should consider all the followings:

• The purchase price of the equipment.
• Estimated operating costs (human resources, reagents, consumables, maintenance, etc.) over a year for example (or even more).
• Side costs: water station, inverters, computers for example.

Let’s take an example. If you are a biologist who is interested in testing different conditions of medium over a sample, and who is in need of a CO2 incubator for an experiment. Then you could find this equipment for a price between €4000 and €7000 approximately. Of course, an incubator takes a room and uses electricity. You’d have to get a maintenance contract just in case. Finally, you’d have to be trained to use it right. Together, it represents an additional several hundred for only a few experiments.

This is in agreement with the study from the R&D magazine, in which 33.8% of the people interrogated said they outsourced because it was “less expensive”.

Dodge a complex procedure

But, before even considering the operating cost, you’d have to follow a procedure to acquire the equipment.

According to Eric Beche and Emmanuel Guillo from the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)_,_there is a specific procedure to follow in order to purchase new equipment.

The first step is to define the need for equipment, of course, then to elaborate the plan to purchase it. Then, you establish the specifications of the equipment you need, which might imply consulting an equipment specialist. Search for technological information on the type of equipment you are looking for, then select the appropriate equipment.

From there on, things get serious and you need to start searching for manufacturers and check the availability of the equipment you want to purchase.

You ask for a quote and of course, you should respect the purchasing procedures of the entity in which you work (CNRS for example). Then you submit the proposed equipment purchase and establish purchase requisition and buy it.

That is quite a lot of things to do, considering that you initially wanted to run some analysis through the equipment. In that case, you should probably consider outsourcing as a simpler way to get your analysis done.

Save time

Also in the study from the R&Dmagazine on the process of outsourcing and its strategic value, we can read that 19.9% of the people interrogated on why they outsource say they do it to have a “faster time to market”.

It simply means that outsourcing seems to shorten the time between.

When you outsource to a provider that specializes in what you’re interested in, then the service will be accomplished way faster.

If you look at a structure like the Genopole in France: more than 20 shared, collaborative and/or service platforms to promote laboratory research and business development. This structure regroups:

• State-of-the-art technological platforms.
• Life sciences research laboratories from universities
• and a medical complex nearby.

Access to shared technical skills means specialized staff and efficient work.

Another example where joining forces and outsource is the answer is the School of Engineering of University of Minho, Portugal.

Due to the evolution of computing, great possibilities exist nowadays regarding virtual labs and remote access laboratories.

In fact, four departments of this university (Mechanical Engineering, Industrial Electronics, Information Systems, and Production and Systems) joined forces and resources to develop a platform. this platform is dedicated to teaching control and automation to the students.

All the resources were grouped and optimized in order to enable more students to access the same equipment, for 24 hours per day. Talking about saving time!

Allow collaborations and investment in other projects

We were just talking about joining forces. About that, it is interesting to see that outsourcing the use of lab equipment enables to establish a relationship with the lab you outsource to.

If you are in the perspective of making a collaboration for a funding application, and you know that a minimum of 3 partners is required for a funding application at the EuropeanCommission for example. Then, you’d probably be interested in collaborating with a lab that you know of, a lab that you entrust. If you have had previous occasion to outsource to a lab, you can be serene if this same lab becomes your collaborator.

Now, you’d have to run through the math for yourself but if the equipment you needed in the first place for your experiment isn’t used so often, how long for it to become actually profitable? As we said before, is it really necessary to spend several thousands of euros only for a couple of experiments? Maybe not. The point is, the money you saved because you outsourced can get into other projects. Why not a new project with one of your outsource collaborators?

In a nutshell, whenever you think you need to buy some equipment or expertise or any service, you’d probably be better off outsourcing. It enables you to avoid critical costs and time-consuming procedures. Along with giving you the opportunity to extend your network and find new collaborators that you can entrust with your work.