Decision-Making & Planning
Lab managers can play an important role in the process of filing patent applications on staff members' inventions. The stakes are often high when patenting a new product or process. So it's important to get everything right. Nowhere is this truer tha
| 2 min read
For many, Project Management means graphs, charts, and procedures, often implemented through a software package, designed to plan and guide to completion repetitive and highly predictable work. If that's what it means, does it have a place in today
| 1 min read
"The chemical industry is leaving the United States, and it won't be back," said Peter Huntsman, CEO of chemical firm Huntsman Corp. "When demand picks back up, they'll build new capacity overseas--in the Middle East, Singapore and China." He was quo
| 2 min read
Turning your researchers into consultants for your customers has at least three advantages. First, in ever more fierce global competition, your firm is selling not just a product but a product and technical service. Your customers will be speaking to
| 3 min read
I've been rereading some of Peter Drucker's books on management. Even though some of these books are over thirty years old, Drucker was quite prescient in discussing trends shaping the business world and the results of these trends. Many of these res
| 2 min read
Laboratories face an uncertain future of more work, fewer resources, more bureaucracy, less discretionary time, more data reporting requirements and fewer experienced people with the knowledge to handle these issues. What does this mean for lab managers?
| 5+ min read
For half a century, Peter Drucker has been the gold standard by which management consultants are judged. He was the first to recognize that management is a discipline worthy of deep study. Some of his remarks in an interview published in the January
| 2 min read
The sell-off of the federal strategic helium reserve has driven up demand for the vital element and poses a threat to the supply that researchers need, a panel of U.S. experts reported on Friday.
| 2 min read
Different industries will recover from the recession at different rates. So in addition to monitoring general economic news, company managers – including lab managers – must closely track business trends in their own industry. The World Chemical Outl
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The Anglo Platinum Group, the world's leading primary producer of platinum metals, recently identified a pressing need to implement more efficient ways to analyse its geological assay data, and turned to Octoplus and the SAS JMP data visualisation tool.
| 4 min read
There are many reasons why projects fail and this will be the subject of my next blog. Right now we'll talk about why you might want to make projects fail early and how you can design projects to for early failure. This seems crazy but there is metho
| 2 min read
The beginning of a new year, let alone a new decade, is the perfect time to rethink the processes used in your lab to procure new equipment. Thanks to evolving online resources, forward-thinking print media content and new solutions offered by vendors, there is likely room in every lab buyer's procedure for improvement.
| 3 min read
