Multi-vendor laboratory services have proved to be a fast growing and strategic market for analytical instrument companies. Such services not only expand a particular instrument company’s share of an end-user’s service revenues, but also provide greater customer intimacy and an expanded presence in the end-user’s lab. As a result, the breadth of such offerings has rapidly expanded, driven by the pharmaceutical industry’s outsourcing and productivity goals and the global expansion of R&D activities. PerkinElmer, GE Healthcare Life Sciences and Thermo Fisher Scientific are among the major providers of multi-vendor laboratory services. Each company’s range of offerings illustrates the rapid growth of this market and the opportunities for improved lab productivity.

Launched in 2003, PerkinElmer’s OneSource Laboratory Services include multi-vendor instrument repair and maintenance, instrument qualification and validation, as well as asset management services such as lab relocation and asset redeployment, and IT services. PerkinElmer Environmental Health’s Service sales, which include OneSource revenue, totaled $484.4 million in 2012. OneSource services are utilized at 300 sites worldwide, consisting primarily of the pharmaceutical industry, and it services half-a-million assets, according Gary Grecsek, vice president of PerkinElmer OneSource. “Fundamentally, the reason why OneSource exists or was created was to get the scientists out of the service workflow,” he said.

Instrument repair and maintenance were the initial offerings of OneSource and remain the foundation of the business and its most popular offering, according to Mr. Grecsek. “There are capabilities around equipment readiness, and that’s your break-fix-repair type of services. We’ve really expanded that as our foundation. We made significant investments in training, parts and logistics, technical support, etc., to really increase our domain knowledge around equipment readiness.” PerkinElmer has also added to the OneSource business through acquisitions and partnerships.

The latest expansion of OneSource offerings includes IT services, facilitated by PerkinElmer’s 2011 software acquisitions (see IBO 3/31/11, 5/31/11). Last year, PerkinElmer introduced OneSource Scientific IT Services, consisting of computing systems services, such as consulting and project management; systems validation, including upgrades; scientific application services; and scientific data services. ”Simplifying the complexity is the key theme that customers are asking companies like PerkinElmer to build skills and capabilities around,” explained Mr. Grecsek. “Now, we are not only managing the assets, but the computers and, in some cases, we’re deploying projects for customers.”

Among OneSource’s informatics offerings is Asset Genius for managing the deployment and utilization of lab assets using instrument-utilization data. Mr. Grecsek discussed how the offering answers key lab efficiency questions. “So there are two things the customer wants to know to maximize their efficiency in the laboratory: how do I maximize the uptime, so that when the scientists need to do science, the instruments are available and up?” explained Mr. Grecsek. “And, secondarily, now the instruments are up and available, what is the utilization rate of those assets?” Describing the solution that OneSource’s informatics offerings provide for disparate and disconnection software platforms found in labs, he said, “That’s one thing we do with Lab IT readiness is we’ll do a project for the customer to harmonize or bring those databases together or consolidate those, so the customer can get single dashboards.”

Another new area for OneSource is strategic lab services. In addition to instrument repair, maintenance and IT, other services are also needed to improve lab productivity, according to Mr. Grecsek. “If you look at the next layer of the onion, you say ‘where are the scientists spending their time now?’ There’s some lower-value scientific activity that the customers are doing that they may be looking to in source or outsource to us. We’re building those capabilities as well.” As OneSource capabilities expand, so do the abilities for labs to improve their productivity. “Where we see it going is you have break-fix-repair people on site, you have computer people, IT-focused people, metrology people on site, you have scientists on site, all in support of our customers’ laboratory within the OneSource umbrella of services,” he said. With such services in place, he estimates that OneSource can result in a 30% increase in a lab’s productivity.

Like PerkinElmer, GE Healthcare Life Sciences continues to expand the offerings of its Smart Asset Management Services (SAMS) business. SAMS’ multi-vendor offerings include lab optimization services, such as process optimization; multivendor life cycle asset management; installation, validation and relocation; and maintenance and optimized utilization. As Matt Sawtell, director of Global Advisory Services at GE Healthcare Life Sciences, told IBO, “Our first Life Sciences customer signed up to a full multi-vendor asset management program in 2005. For many years, GE had been offering multi-vendor programs across other GE businesses including health care, aviation and others.”

Unlike PerkinElmer, GE SAMS provides OEM services as well as multi-vendor solutions. “Initially customers were looking to achieve cost savings by using a single-source supplier and the simplification that this brings to their business processes,” explained Mr. Sawtell. “Over the years, there has been a shift to develop more partnerships with OEMs in order to be able to provide a more holistic approach to support, thus helping to ensure that OEMs, multi-vendor suppliers and the customer all benefit from the whole asset-management experience.”

GE SAMS’ multi-vendor programs service large pharmaceutical companies’ R&D operations, according to Mr. Sawtell. “The scope of these programs range from supporting laboratory spaces with anywhere from 2,000 to 35,000 assets,” he said. “Some of the programs are limited to single sites, while others cover multiple sites, and mean that we provide consolidated centralized support and the corresponding data, along with analytics tools, to interrogate these data to enable better decision making.“ The main offerings of SAMS, according to him, are contract management, multi-vendor maintenance, instrument qualification, and data systems reporting for service and cost transactions.

A new SAMS offering is Laboratory Asset Management Assessment (LAMA). “It is an advisory service that provides a customer with an analysis of the current state of critical areas around equipment, support and service, which covers IT systems, data, quality, service levels [and] inventory,” explained Mr. Sawtell. “The output of a LAMA is a report documenting the current status along with suggestions of where to focus efforts to achieve improvements.”

This offering is indicative of the trend toward productivity enhancement utilizing informatics tools. “We see a strong continuing need for our SAMS offering, and we see a further demand for using the data captured in a more proactive way to help drive business decisions—in fact, this is an ongoing theme,” noted Mr. Sawtell. “Generally, service is evolving from the standard core break-fix-service activities into more services and technologies and tools to help drive productivity, increase capacity and provide clearer insights into the pharmaceutical workspace outside of just asset management,” he said. “As pharmaceutical companies are evaluating and incorporating risk-based validation models, we expect to see adoption of more risk-based service models and approaches that have been proven in other industry sectors such as Reliability Centered Maintenance. Predictive maintenance will become more important in the drive to increase uptime performance for scientists.” Reliability Centered Maintenance preserves an asset’s task using preventative maintenance.

Thermo Fisher Scientific’s multi-vendor offerings are also incorporating new informatics tools. Last year, the company launched Unity Lab Services, which unified under a single brand the lab services businesses of Thermo Scientific, Fisher Scientific and Avantec, a legacy Fisher Scientific service brand based in Europe. “Unity Lab Services helps our customers consolidate fragmented service delivery methods and vendors into a single solution for laboratory service and support,” stated Rodney Smith, president of Unity Lab Services. “Through this streamlined approach, we achieve cost savings for our customers by managing laboratory instrument lifecycles and the total cost of ownership, increasing the scientist’s productivity and simplifying procurement by offering one supplier managed under one contract for lower costs.”

Unity Lab Services serves a range of end-users, including the pharmaceutical, chemical and process industries. Offerings includes Instrument Services, such as service support plans, off-site depot repair centers, and compliance and validation services; and Enterprise Services, including workflow consulting and new lab set-up, asset management, supply management and support services. “Our global workforce of more than 2,400 professionals includes instrument service engineers, laboratory support specialists, and inventory and customer support representatives,” noted Mr. Smith.

Unity Lab Services emphasize a single-source solution, according to Mr. Smith. “Unity Lab Services provides a single source for integrated lab service, support and supply management. Our customized service offerings and world-class service experts have the flexibility and experience to uniquely address business needs.” The array of services encompass multiple solutions. “We offer a range of capabilities, from traditional laboratory instrument and equipment services to enterprise-level support, including business analytics for continuous improvement, and management of laboratory staffing and consumables inventory,” he explained.

Mr. Smith cited Enterprise Services as one of Unity Lab Services’ most popular offerings, describing it as a “comprehensive multi-vendor suite to manage all aspects of laboratory operations from procurement and logistics, to on-site support functions, to our extensive capabilities in asset management and supply management.” Among the newest Enterprise Services products is Unity SmartCapture Asset Utilization Monitoring, which combines software and service. “For the first time, organizations can make decisions based on actual equipment usage data from all makes and models of lab instrumentation and equipment,” he said. “This knowledge enables our customers to reduce downtime risk, cut capital expenditures and decrease equipment maintenance costs.”