Chromatography Forum

Hi there,

I run a high-throughput lab here at the university and we are in the process of setting up a fee structure for, among others, our analytical instruments. We have a GC-MS, GC-FID, SFC-UV and HPLC-UV and are trying to establish prices per hour for each of these (for educational and external users).

The eventual goal is to make the facility self-sustaining. So I've been hunting around the web to get ideas of how much people in other universities are charging for use of their analytical instruments.

If anyone has an idea of how much these instruments cost (in supplies and maintenance), please do share. I'm aware that HPLC can vary greatly with the type of solvent used but we are thinking of setting up individual solvent charges for this.

I'll post this in the GC forum as well to get maximum feedback (sorry for the "double" post).

Thanks!

Roxanne.

Hi Roxanne

Whatever cost you come up with the users will whine that it is too high, so be generous to yourself rather than to the users.

If you have records of how much you have spent over the past few years / months then divide that by the hours of use, and double it.

If you have no records, divide the cost of the capital equipment by the hours of use in the period over which you usually write off the cost (these days it should be 5 years), add routine maintenance and repair costs (including in-house labour), add consumables and expendables (inlet liners, septa, guard columns, columns etc), add utilities and gas, divide by hours, and double it.

Offer good discounts for large batches of samples, long sessions that do not require set-ups to be changed, and clean samples that do not fill the instruments with crud.

The rationale behind charging high is that you need a buffer for unpredictable extra costs, low costs simply encourage people to run more samples instead of maximising the information they get from the samples they run, you can argue away people's whining but you cannot argue away a budget deficit. Any "profit" that you make will get sucked back into the system anyway. If the lab goes bust due to lack of income the users are the ones who suffer the most - I've seen it happen.


Peter

Hi Roxanne,

Peter's "doubling it" will help you to avoid having a too complicated pricing structure.

Additionally, factor in sufficient realistic time for sample prep, data collation, sample disposal and reporting in your pricing.

You may want to consider a premium for fast turnaround - e.g. 100% surcharge for starting within 24hrs, 50% for 3 days.

For large sample numbers a rough rule of thumb that I use is to assume that the instrument will work for a maximum of 20hrs a day for 3 days a week. In the short term this allows for sample loading/removal, sequence writing, basic maintenance and in the longer term things like holidays, breakdowns and the unexpected. Being able to run 100m in 10 seconds does not mean that a marathon can be run in 69 minutes.

As Peter said, people will whine but it costs what it costs.

Ralph

I always wondered how far can someone go with a well equiped university lab. Most of the time, there are not labor to pay as most of the work is done by the undergraduate or graduate students so someone could think that they can really offer very competitive prices when compared to contract laboratories. Assuming that you only have to pay one person for supervision and/or quality control a lab could make money out of it (and reinvest it to equipment or maybe internal grants)... In this case a well equiped university lab would be one with several LC-MS-MS and some LC-UV's for LC method development...

I wonder if that could be possible...

PostPosted: Mon May 28, 2007 11:05 pm Post subject:
I always wondered how far can someone go with a well equiped university lab. Most of the time, there are not labor to pay as most of the work is done by the undergraduate or graduate students so someone could think that they can really offer very competitive prices when compared to contract laboratories. Assuming that you only have to pay one person for supervision and/or quality control a lab could make money out of it (and reinvest it to equipment or maybe internal grants)... In this case a well equiped university lab would be one with several LC-MS-MS and some LC-UV's for LC method development...

Well maybe before you wrote that, maybe you should have considered...
...you should know that maybe "university lab" doesn't mean "students' practice lab". There are a lot of labs on the University, I suppose, that are not reachable for students (I mean students cannot work on the equipment, except for postgraduates or specialists). And "YES" that kind of lab can be self-sustaining, because in that lab work highly educated personal (not to mention MScs, PhDs) who can offer the same maybe even better service than contract laboratories.

I am working in such lab on the university, that's why I cannot completely agree with you

Best regards

Zokinato,

I do not think there is any case of agreement or disagreement with what I say. My message is more or less a question and not a statement. Furthermore, I said undergraduate or graduate student which include MSc and PhD's...

So you are saying that you are working in a University lab that has the equipment to take jobs that a contract laboratory would do... but it doesn't?

Hi Kostas

In South Africa we have university labs that do external contract work. In the good cases the contracts are used as part of a postgrad's research, and the work is more speculative than would be handled by a contract lab. In the bad cases universities (and technical colleges) use students as poorly paid and underskilled cheap labour and instruments paid for with taxpayers money, to offer a cut price low quality routine analysis service that undercuts contract labs that have to account for their money. A result of this is that many contract labs go bust, so there are no jobs for the students who did the work.

My personal feeling is that univesrities and techncial colleges should be educating students, not competing with the student's future employees.

Regards

Peter