Managing instruments across multiple sites requires more than knowing what equipment is available. Lab leaders also need reliable asset data, consistent maintenance practices, clear local ownership, and a fair process for capital planning. Without that foundation, organizations risk duplicative spending, compliance gaps, and underused equipment. In this Q&A, Kelly Sullivan of CIC explains how lab managers can improve transparency, standardize practices across sites, and make better use of existing assets.
Q: What are the biggest challenges laboratory leaders face when managing instruments and other assets across multiple sites?
A: Transparency is the starting point. Without a clear picture of what assets exist across sites, their condition, and usage data, you're working in the dark, and you risk spending capital on equipment that already exists somewhere else in the network.
Equipment maintenance and standardization make the transparency issue worse. Each site often develops its own habits and informal tracking systems, and that drift makes it hard to know whether preventive maintenance is current, calibration records are complete, or an asset that looks available is actually fit for use. When local systems don't connect, leaders end up managing on assumption, and multiplied across sites, that risk grows fast, especially for instruments tied to compliance or quality requirements.
Q: What are some of the most common mistakes organizations make when trying to standardize asset management practices across different laboratories?
A: The biggest mistake I have seen again and again is treating standardization as a systems problem when it's really a people problem. Organizations invest in software or new processes, roll them out centrally, and expect adoption to follow. But it rarely does.
Change management is where most efforts fall short. The "why" has to be concrete. Not "the organization needs better visibility" but "you'll spend less time hunting down calibration records" or "you won't get surprised by an instrument being taken offline for PM mid-study." When people see a direct connection between the new practice and their own daily frustrations, adoption looks different.
Standardization also has to flex. A framework that works for a large, compliance-heavy site won't map cleanly onto a smaller lab with a lean team and different regulatory requirements. The core principles can stay consistent, but the implementation often can't, and organizations that don't build that flexibility in upfront end up with sites that can't realistically comply, or that comply on paper and drift in practice. Part of that flexibility is choosing the right owner at each site, someone with authority, context, and credibility locally.
Q: How should managers approach capital planning when assets are distributed across sites with competing priorities and budgets?
A: Capital planning across multiple sites is hard because every site has legitimate needs and real constraints. Without a structured approach, decisions get made reactively, and whoever surfaces a need first or most urgently wins. That's not planning; it's just responding.
The starting point is visibility. You can't make good capital decisions without knowing what you have, where it is, how old it is, and how heavily it's being used, so asset age, utilization rates, and maintenance history all need to feed into capital conversations. If that data doesn't exist or isn't trusted, the planning process is already compromised before it begins.
A shared prioritization framework brings objectivity to the process, but who builds it matters as much as what's in it. It shouldn't be handed down from a central team in isolation. The rubric needs input from site leaders, finance, compliance, and operations, and when the people being evaluated by the framework help shape it, the criteria feel fair, and the outcomes are easier to stand behind.
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The framework scores requests against consistent criteria: compliance risk, utilization, asset age and condition, cost of deferral, strategic alignment, and any other important details you choose. Every request gets evaluated the same way, and that consistency is what builds trust across sites. When people understand how capital decisions get made and why a request was approved or deferred, they stop second-guessing the process.
Q: How can organizations foster better collaboration between sites to encourage equipment sharing, redeployment, or more strategic use of existing assets?
A: A large barrier to collaboration is that sites are often measured and resourced individually, so when a site is accountable for its own budget and utilization metrics, sharing an asset can feel like giving something away. Leadership has to fix that by recognizing and rewarding the behavior they want to see. A site that absorbs a redeployed asset instead of requesting a new one should get credit toward their capital expenditure budget, or have that decision factored positively into their next budget cycle, and when the incentive structure reinforces collaboration, the culture follows.
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Q: If a lab manager has limited resources to improve asset management, what are the first three actions you would recommend they take?
A: First, get a baseline, and this cannot be overstated. Before building anything, ask each site how they currently track assets, since one site may already have a template that works or practices worth sharing, and the best starting point is often already sitting within your own network. From there, a shared live spreadsheet (Google Sheets or Excel in Microsoft 365) with consistent fields across sites is enough: asset type, location, condition, age, and utilization. You don't need costly software to get started; you need correct, clean, consistent data that everyone can see and contribute to.
Second, identify your highest-risk assets, since not everything needs the same attention. Talk to your site teams, because they know which instruments are critical, which ones have a history of issues, and where the gaps are. Focus first on assets tied to compliance, revenue-generating work, or critical research, and ask what the consequence would be if one of these went down unexpectedly. That conversation, combined with a risk assessment, tells you where to put maintenance and tracking effort first.
Third, find your local owners. In most organizations, this person already exists: the one others go to with questions, the one who knows where everything is and why it's there. They just haven't been formally recognized. Formally acknowledging their role and their contributions to the larger organization not only validates the work they've already been doing, but it also signals to the rest of the org that this work has value. Without that recognition, you risk losing them to other priorities.
These three actions don't require a significant budget. They require clarity, consistency, and follow-through.
Q: As labs adopt more digital tools and connected technologies, how is multi-site asset management evolving, and what should lab leaders be preparing for now?
A: The shift is already underway. Labs are moving from reactive asset management—tracking what broke and when—to predictive and connected systems that surface problems before they happen, and a big part of that evolution is consolidation. What used to live across five different platforms or spreadsheets now lives in one place.
What that means in practice is that everything you need to know about an asset is in one place, connected, and accessible across sites. That level of integration was not practical for most labs even five years ago, and it's changing how leaders manage and make decisions across their networks.
But the technology is only as good as the foundation underneath it, since garbage in still means garbage out. Labs that haven't solved the basics—clean data, clear ownership, consistent processes—won't get value from sophisticated tools. Technology is evolving fast, and the organizations that will get the most from it are the ones who did the unglamorous work first and have teams who know how to act on what the data is telling them.
