Inventory of Critical Instruments

Campus Solna is reviewing service agreements with Akademiska Hus (AH) and will be negotiating eventual changes this fall during the month of September. The agreements being reviewed cover critical physical parameters including electrical power supply, compressed air, gasses, water, temperature control, ventilation, etc. To ensure that updated agreements accurately reflect current requirements, Site-Support is assembling a detailed database of critical and expensive instruments. An updated instrument database is essential to define appropriate service levels, negotiate response and repair times with AH. 

Critical instruments are those judged to be essential to ongoing research or are central components of national infrastructures. These instruments may be sensitive to disruptions in any of the services provided by AH, and unexpected breakdowns would cause significant loss of productivity and expense. Expensive instruments are those associated with ≥ 1 MSEK in total acquisition cost.

Background
The recent failure in the compressed air supply in the Alfa building illustrates the importance of creating a detailed instrument database. The breakdown of air compressors resulted in significant problems for several instruments and sample preparation robots, which led to the loss of many unique and valuable samples. The repair process was delayed due to unnecessary confusion regarding the need for highly pure, hospital quality compressed air. Our intention is to avoid or minimize the effects of these types of failures in the future and prevent overly long repair times.

Our ambition is to maintain the instrument database up to date and aim to carry out an annual inventory. The database will be made available to the community to enhance awareness of our combined capacities. Hopefully, this will facilitate cooperation between groups and may reduce unnecessary acquisitions. Eventually, the instrumentation database could be used for booking instruments online.