Chromatography Forum

I've recently become nominally responsible for a small academic LC and GC facility. It isn't supposed to make a profit but should support itself, cover maintenance etc.

I've no idea, so I'm asking you experts: What is a reasonable charge to levy persample or per hour to cover the above costs?

Consumables are provided by the users, so there are only gases which work out at about £600 yr. However I've no idea how much extra to add for maintenance. All the systems are old, and currently without a service contract. There is enough inhouse expertise to perform most regular tasks.

It was previously included in a general building budgets with no specific breakdown of costs that I've been able to find, though I am still looking as this seems the most obvious place to find guideline amounts but failing that:
All thoughts welcome in whatever currency seems useful.

If your customers are providing the consumables, and if your people are working regular hours, then the bulk of your costs are fixed. You should be able to find out what the total operating cost was over the last year or two. Adjust that upward for inflation, divide by the estimated number of samples, and bob's your uncle.

Do you supply any labour ( or even labor ), in which case you need to include that component in costings.

The normal method is to estimate total cost of operations, including labour, instrument maintenance, depreciation, training, and overheads ( building services costs, rents, solvent disposal, etc. ).

Once you have the total cost, you can divide the number of samples by the cost. It's possible that you're being asked for a budget figure, so ensure you capture all costs, as it's always better to have sufficient bikkies.

However, if you are providing labour, it's fairly usual to reward batches of samples, so there is often a method setup cost which a diminishing per sample charge as batch sample numbers incrase.

Bruce Hamilton

Labour - Is charged additionally. For trained users they can "walk-up" and run their own samples at cost a. Other users can request that I run the samples for them etc at cost a+MyTime which is set.

I've estimated a few of the costs suggested. Anybody got any sample figures for maintenance?

I don't intend to have a service contract, but I don't know what the other costs might come to: How often do LCs and GC need to have an engineer come out?

A sneaky way to estimate maintenance costs is to ask for a quotation for a service contract - nobody says that you have to accept the quotation !

On the one occasion that I did a really detailed costing on an HPLC analysis (to demonstrate to the bean counters that our lab was subsidising another lab's operations by undercharging for in-house services) I was surprised to find that the main cost per sample was guard columns and columns, and not the expected capital costs or solvents. This was for almost raw plant extracts which were pretty rough on the system, and where everything had to be in perfect condition to get the resolution, but even with cleaner samples it will be worth doing a real costing.

Peter

based on my experiance with MS, service quotations are £000 for a flying visit by a guy who cleans a couple of bits and puts it back together.

There is enough in-house knowledge to do this - I think. None of the users seems to know when the last major breakdown was, or how much it cost to fix, which is what I probably should be budgetting to cover. Callout engineer time I estimate at £100/hour but for how long and with what additional parts? Or is this not a significant issue? do LCs and GCs just not break in a non-user repairable manner?

Thanks for the responses though, they are useful.

do LCs and GCs just not break in a non-user repairable manner?

Depends on the brand, most major brands have good service and maintenance manuals for the flow path hardware of instruments, but if the electronics break it's usually a support call, so they can hunt down and replace printed circuit boards.

If you have several instruments, or poor local support, you are more likely to hold spares etc, and learn more complex maintenance.

Based on my experience, I would allow 5% of purchase cost per annum for maintenance for the first 4 years. that would cover parts you replace during maintenance, such as pump seals and valves, injector seals, DAD lamps, GC gas seals etc.

I would increase that to 7% for subsequent years for an HPLC, but keep it the same for a GC. If you are happy using non-OEM parts, you can probably halve the figures.

If your time is charged, then you can do a comparision with the serviceperson's rate, just multiply the time he takes by 2 - 4, according to how skilled you are.

It's hard to suggest values for electronic components, because they are much more senstive to the local electrical and laboratory environment. If the instruemnst are on good-quality conditioned power, and in a filtered Air Conditioned room, they have few problems.

If they are in a converted office opening onto the factory floor, you should allow for about 5% per annum for replacement boards and dust removal.

If instruments are deemed "critical" in your business risk assessment, you should have one of the following, instrument redundancy, a strong service service agreement, or a good relationship with the serviceperson.

Think of it this way. If you budget for the worst case scenario, you'll have money to spend at year end, but if you budget for the best case scenario, Murphy comes visiting, and you have a lot of grovelling and explaining to do.

Bruce Hamilton