The service involves Agilent placing its engineers on site to regularly handle maintenance, repair, regulatory compliance, workflow consulting and reporting services for all chromatography and other instrumentation, regardless of equipment vendor.
The company claims that Agilent's LRM service programme can reduce instrument downtime by a factor of four compared with standard support agreements with individual vendors, because on-site engineers can respond more promptly and are familiar with a customer's laboratory.
"Agilent LRM can improve lab productivity by reducing administration and downtime, and it can reduce the total costs of running a lab by 15 per cent or more," according to May Van, vice president and general manager of Agilent's Consumables and Service Solutions business.
The company also mainains that the LRM service minimises the time customer employees spend handling instrument failures by reducing time spent troubleshooting, reporting failures, escorting and familiarising engineers, and re-qualifying failed modules. In one example, this time dropped from 8.5 employee hours per failure to only 75 minutes.
Laboratory management and procurement departments are tasked with reducing lab operation costs while keeping productivity high, said Agilent, adding that its LRM enables them to do so by improving engineer utilisation, standardising maintenance protocols, reducing the number of service contractors engaged, and allowing customers to define and pay for the exact level of service they need.