Proper storage of biological assets is vital to keep your research moving forward. Yet, while you focus on research activities, it’s all too common for sample and critical reagent inventories to morph into an unorganized sprawl. The most obvious impact is time spent finding your materials of interest, but there are other consequences to sample disorganization.
Dedicated experts in better storage management can help to declutter your cold storage inventory so that you recover time and space while reducing your expenses and carbon footprint. This holds true for all types of institutions that have research labs as well as diagnostic labs and manufacturing operations.
Read on to learn four great benefits that sample management efficiency experts offer so that you can achieve a well-organized, sustainable cold storage inventory.
What Are Better Storage Management Experts?
Better storage management experts, also known as material or sample management experts, specialize in helping laboratories optimize their cold storage to streamline their space and workflows.
Using a hands-on and collaborative approach, these better storage management experts start with an objective assessment of your organization’s cold storage infrastructure and sample management practices. From this assessment, they will recommend improvements that may save time, free up valuable laboratory space, curtail unnecessary costs, and even reduce your lab’s carbon footprint.
1. Smarter Sample Inventory Management Lets You Spend More Time on Critical Research
Nothing slows down the day like searching for materials in cold storage. Perhaps the sample location wasn’t clearly documented, or the location inadvertently changed as your materials of interest were moved during other searches. Maybe an adhered label fell off or was misread. Whatever the reason, searching for items in cold storage can eat up precious time.
Prolonged searches can also jeopardize material integrity. The more time you spend manually combing through your cold storage, the more you risk exposing critical items to temperature fluctuations.
With logically organized and well-documented cold storage spaces and proper management tools, you can quickly visualize and track materials throughout their life cycles. This includes accessing the items you need while protecting items stored in the same units from exposure.
This smart approach to cold storage inventory management reduces time spent on searches and repeated or delayed experiments so that you can more fully focus on driving your projects and research forward.
Consider this: One biopharmaceutical company gained 100 hours per year, per researcher, through better cold storage management. What could your team accomplish with this or similar time savings?
2. Organized Cold Storage Makes Better Use of Laboratory Space
Cold storage equipment—meaning refrigerators, freezers, ultra-low freezers, and cryostorage tanks—is bulky and, in fact, can consume up to ~26% of space* in an already crowded laboratory.
A quick peek at any given refrigerator or freezer often reveals plenty of unused storage space on the shelves and in freezer boxes/racks. Add this up among all your cold storage devices, and you’ll quickly realize that a large portion of your valuable lab space is wasted.
A detailed better sample management analysis includes documenting access frequency. Items requiring immediate or daily access may be stored within the lab, while those that may only be needed periodically can be stored in a centralized location in the same facility as the lab or a location that is nearby and can provide same day delivery. Long-term storage items may be moved to an offsite specialized storage location where space is more cost-effective. Material requested from here is returned within a couple of days.
Organizing by frequency of use can help to consolidate in-lab storage systems and reduce the need for multiple storage devices in the lab space. You then have room to expand your space for doing experiments, add new testing equipment or facilitate easier access around the lab.
Consider this: A multi-site customer leveraged better sample management to reclaim over 26,000 square feet of lab space previously occupied by refrigerators, freezers, and cryogenic freezers. How could your team utilize this extra space?
3. Streamlined Cold Storage Inventories Reduce Your Capital Expenses and Operating Costs
Management is always interested in ways to reduce laboratory expenses, right? Refrigerators and freezers cost money even beyond the upfront purchase price. Part of your annual budget goes towards electricity to power these cold storage units, preventative maintenance, repairs, and even liquid nitrogen for cryostorage tanks. These bills can add up quickly.
When management asks you for ways to reduce laboratory expenses, you can introduce them to better storage management as one avenue to achieve cost reductions. A formal assessment of the current situation will identify quantifiable savings that can be achieved.
The assessment will offer recommendations to simplify your inventory which allows your facility or enterprise to consolidate and reduce the number of necessary on-site cold storage units. Fewer units means lower operating and maintenance costs and decreases the capital spend required to replace old/failing units.
It’s also worth noting that time is money, so the less time people are spending on sample searches, the more time they can spend on high value tasks.
Consider this: Through a better storage management assessment and implementation project, a large US-based pharmaceutical enterprise was able to realize savings of over $2.7 million dollars annually. How would you and your team benefit from an extra $2.7 million dollars per year?
4. Optimized Sample Storage Helps to Support Sustainability Goals at Your Institution
Streamlining cold storage is an effective means to help reduce laboratory waste and meet corporate or laboratory sustainability goals. In the last section, we discussed how a better storage management assessment and change management tools will help to identify ways to streamline cold storage inventory and reduce the number of refrigerators and freezers needed at your laboratory or at an enterprise level. But the successful outcomes don’t stop there.
In addition to freeing up lab space and reducing expenses, fewer pieces of equipment mean less energy use and a reduction in carbon emissions. Clear guidelines for maintaining the on-site cold storage units and the materials within them will help to sustain energy-efficient operations over time.
Consider this: To support their laboratory sustainability goals, a life science enterprise leveraged a better storage management assessment and implemented changes to reduce their annual carbon emissions by over 2,000 metric tons. What impact would 2,000 metric tons make toward your facility’s green initiatives in research?
How to Get the Most from Your Better Storage Management Assessment
Of course, maximizing the great benefits of a cold storage management efficiency assessment is dependent on how recommendations are implemented and sustained across your facility or enterprise.
To aid this process, and for further convenience and efficiency, the storage management experts can implement recommended changes directly in your laboratory, work with and train your staff, implement tools to sustain efficient cold storage management, and measure success against your goals.
Start Improving Your Cold Storage Management Inventories and Processes Today
Excessive time spent searching in freezers for what you need doesn’t have to be the norm in your daily routine. Cold storage management efficiency experts, like the Better Storage Management Team at Azenta Life Sciences, can identify multiple ways to organize your samples and other items in cold storage, implement tools to precisely manage organization, and keep your teams on track to sustain streamlined cold storage management processes.
Start the process with our cold storage unit savings calculator!