Hi Ken,
You will never have 100% 24/7. You need to factor downtime for maintenance
and management as a minimum. On a routine walk-up instrument, I average this
to be about 4 hours per week across the year. For more complex systems that
might involve lots of probe changes, system troubleshooting, method development
etc, this number will be a lot higher. Unless your 30% already includes
maintenance time? If considering 24/7/365 usage, I would consider above 60%
as high demand.
A lot depends on what the main function of the instrument is, and who uses it.
You can’t compare usage of a walk-up 300 that is used for high-throughput
crude 1H samples, supporting a whole department of busy chemists, with a 900
with cryo that runs experiments that go for days at a time.
Some factors to consider are:
-How is usage calculated on other analytical systems at your institution?
Compare your usage with the most favourable.
-Choose your goalposts according to how the instrument is used. One of the
usage KPIs used by one of the number-crunching departments here is based on
business hours (ie 9-5 Mon-Fri). NMR romps it in, exceeding 150% usage on most
of our instruments. Our 300, that is used primarily to support daily workflow,
is considered our highest demand instrument and while it still exceeds 100%,
it does not have the highest usage overall because people want to use it
during the time they are at work.
-Wait time : researchers might prioritise minimum wait times that support
continuation of other lab activities over high instrument usage. Availability
when it is needed is important.
-number of users it supports
-number of samples / experiments per week/month/year (number per year always
looks more impressive). If you are running in automation, then number of samples
per day should actually be an easy metric to capture
-number of publications the instrument has supported
Regards,
Ian
Ian Luck | Facility Manager
Magnetic Resonance Node, Sydney Analytical
Core Research Facilities
THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
T +61 2 9351 2851
> From: main_at_ammrl.groups.io <main_at_ammrl.groups.io> On Behalf Of Kenneth Sharp-Knott via groups.io
> Sent: Wednesday, November 8, 2023 4:52 AM
> To: ammrl_at_groups.io
> Subject: [AMMRL] Measuring instrument use/capacity
Assuming an instrument (with automation) at 100% capacity is used 24 hours
a day, what is a heavily used instrument?
We are trying to justify updating an older - heavily used instrument - but
when looked at from this statistic, it's only averaging about 30% of it's
theoretical capacity. Do you exclude weekends bumping this value to an average
of 40% use?
Another option is # of samples run/day which is really hard to measure and
perhaps is an even worst statistic.
Curious on how you manipulate these numbers and what you consider to be a
'heavily used' instrument.
Best
--
Ken Sharp-Knott
Manager of Analytical Services and the NMR Facility
Department of Chemistry
Virginia Tech
(540)267-6502 (Cell)
(540)231-0885 (Office)
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Received on Wed Nov 08 2023 - 08:35:12 MST