Chromatography Forum

Due to the budget control, the management is thinking to cut off the service contract of the HPLCs and GCs with Agilent. Simple repair is not a problem. But how about OQ/PV? I'd like to know do you do OQ/PV by your own. How to do it? Is there a commericial training couse provided Agilent or other companies?

If you can handle most of the routine maintenance and usual faults yourself then go ahead and cancel you will save money in the long run. Be prepared to wait much longer when you have a problem you cant handle though as contrract customers will always get priority treatment. Alternatively try switching to a third party provider. As for your validation issues try contacting NLG Analytical www.nlg-analytical.co.uk They may be able to help you on both counts as I know they also provide servicing. I'm sure there are others but they are just the first to spring to mind.

Our production facilities labs all have service contracts. We have only one here, on our single FTIR (about $3.5K). We have 6 Agilent HPLC, some with DAD, RI, one with MS, and 7 GC, 4 with MS, and we don't do any service contracts here for those. Four of the units are used for pharamaceutical and have yearly Preventative Maintenance and Performance Verifications, maybe $3.5K each. I think we're talking over $100K per year to carry service contracts on all these, so we stay ahead this way as we can do most routine repairs ourselves (autosampler rotors, pistons, seals, oven flap motors, GC oven fans, 7673 motors and belts, 5890 inlet pressure regualtors, etc.

No details about where in the world you are ? To reduce costs you can try a third party service support organisation although I would recommend one that specialises in your kit (NLG above seem to be Shimadzu specialists). There are plenty of organisations here in the UK with factory training on Agilent equipment.
Regarding OQ/PV you should already be carrying this sort of work out on a regular basis to monitor the performace of your systems. The reason to use an external organisation (manufacturer/third party) is that for acreditation you need the systems to be checked by an independent analyst.

Thank you for your reply. I am in Singapore. I don't know any third party contractor here. CE instrument, do you have any idea?

We usually engage Agilent to do annual OQ/PV for us since it is in the package of the service contract. Though we are not GMP lab, we do provide technical suggestion and advice for the production of pharmaceutial products. Thus we need at least OQ/PV annually to prove that our equipment is qualified to perform the test. Agilent does not provide OQ/PV training, so that i'd like to know how your guys doing OQ/PV. We have 4 Agilent HPLCs with RI,VWD & DAD, 2GCs with FID, TCD & MS.

take a day off and sit down with the agilent engineer while he's running the OQ/PV. Make good notes and ask questions. You need to order some parts such as restriction capillary and caffeine standards. You should then be able to do it by your own. The tests are performed by the verification section of the chemstation software and as far as I know there are no limitations for doing it by yourself. The software gives detailed instructions throughout the verification. I haven't done it my self but I've sat down with them few times just to understand what they are doing. We have the contract as we are running high buffer and salt concentrations and we know we have about 5 service visits per year anyway so it will pay off for us.

I agree you need a training certificate and it would be nice to run it by an indipendent operator. However, it doesn't have to be an external company.