By Matt Weiss, Owner and Lead Service Engineer
Lab Instrument Service Contracts
Lab instrument service contracts are an integral part of a well functioning lab. With how important it is, the thought of having your support engineer local is considered a major plus when searching for HPLC service. The comfort that the proximity provides is natural. Running a business of any sort, in any industry, relies heavily on confidence and comfort. As a company, Elite LCMS centers our service philosophy around the premise of offering such confidence. Confidence that the HPLC instruments that directly contribute to your bottom line are well taken care of and are functioning at their peak. That instruments are operating at their maximum uptime so to best support the goals of our customers. The nature of providing HPLC service necessitates this be the case, but so often laboratories suffer from inadequate service, resulting in compromised uptime.
Of course, your service contract will require acute issues, minor or major, be fixed or addressed within a designated response timeframe. Further, a majority of HPLC service providers will adhere to those obligations quickly. The capacity to do this is rarely aided by the presence of a locally residing engineer. In fact, using this as your criterium for picking a service provider could leave you handcuffed to a local engineer that may not provide the efficacy you’re looking for.
To be more specific, a local engineer is an advantage for any customer, if, and only if, they happen to be doing absolutely nothing at the time a service call is requested. This would of course free them up to show up that same day, provided they have the parts with them. But no service organization is going to have an engineer not being engaged. When your local engineer’s workflow slows, they will typically be called upon to help other engineers. And when it isn’t slow, and they are not helping other engineers, they are typically on-site elsewhere in their region supporting other customers. With an industry standard response time of 48 hours, the engineer that has a 5-hour drive, a 3-hour flight, or is only 30 minutes away, will ultimately support your account in the exact same way.
