Efficiency and productivity are critical in any industry, but the ramifications are more significant in some industries than others.
For example, if a McDonald’s isn’t running efficiently, it’s not that big of a deal because they are still serving customers at a somewhat slower pace. However, efficiency is critical in a laboratory because results have far-reaching implications. Read on to learn about some tricks to improve efficiency in your laboratory.
Conduct regular maintenance
To guarantee efficiency in your laboratory, you must go above and beyond when it comes to maintenance. Having outdated equipment that you clean once in a blue moon is not conducive to accurate results or an efficient laboratory. Instead, you should have everything on a strict cleaning and calibration schedule so that whenever anyone in the lab uses these pieces of equipment, they are guaranteed to work correctly. It can be hard to find time to maintain everything in a busy lab schedule, but if there is a clear checklist of what to take care of every night, things can run smoothly.
Choose the right equipment
When managing a laboratory, one of the most important things you can do is invest in the right equipment. Doing so ensures that everyone in the lab can do their jobs efficiently and put out the correct data. The right equipment will also last a long time. For example, if you manage a lab working with lasers, you have a lot of important considerations to make, like choosing the proper laser diode mount. The laser will weaken over time without the appropriate mount, and the results you get in the interim may also not be what you want. Each laser can serve a different purpose, and you need a mount that works for your purposes; apply this philosophy to every other piece of equipment in your lab, and it will thrive!
Ditch paper
Many past laboratories solely used paper to document the information, equations, and data that lab technicians were working with. This process works, but in today’s digital world, it is sorely outdated and improvable with technology. Instead of paper, you can improve lab efficiency by going digital, simplifying the way data is logged and archived. For example, if you only use paper notes, you’d have to rummage through to try and find your data from a specific day. However, if everything is digital, you simply have to do a little search to find the information. Using a digital system also eliminates the need for massive filing cabinets of information, so the lab also will have a more streamlined look and feel.
Improve efficiency in your laboratory with these tricks, and your lab will produce more results with more evidence and data than ever before. Managing a lab can be tricky because you want things to go quickly, but more important than that is the accuracy of your data. With these tricks, you can achieve both!
