J. P. Casabar, senior director of lab services at Flagship Facility Services
FLAGSHIP FACILITY SERVICES
J. P. Casabar serves as senior director of lab services at Flagship Lab Services, a nationwide integrated facility management and multi-service laboratory services provider. With a background in cell & molecular biology, equipment, and laboratory operations, he brings life sciences R&D experience and operational insight to complex laboratory environments, with a focus on helping companies from startups to established pharma optimize their research facilities to enhance operational efficiencies.
Q: Where does the disconnect between scientific rigor and facility oversight first show up in a typical lab?
A: "In sites without a dedicated facilities resource, the lab manager absorbs the work. They come from a scientific background where SOPs and asset maintenance plans are familiar territory; facilities sit outside that frame. It gets treated as property management's domain, not something that belongs inside the scientific workflow.
HVAC is the clearest example. A company moves in, building management says the space is designed for life science, and that assurance gets taken at face value. Then the equipment arrives. An alcove that looked perfect for a freezer farm has no dedicated thermostat or ventilation. Freezers start failing. Few scientists have the background to pressure-test those claims unassisted, which is where the blind spot lives. Without facility-side redundancies planned from the start, it stops being a question of whether something goes wrong, but when."
Q: Growth-stage labs often manage facilities the same way they did at ten people. At what point does that become a real risk?
A: "It generally comes down to physical space. In an incubator designed for one work group—five or ten scientists—if something happens it affects that group and nothing else. That's manageable.
When a growth-stage company expands to half a floor or multiple suites running on a single system, the math changes. One failure can take out every research group in the building. The risk scales with the square footage, not the headcount. Expansion forces the infrastructure question: backup power, HVAC sized for the larger footprint, redundancies that didn't matter in one shared space.
Labs moving toward regulated workflows face an additional layer. Environmental health and safety requirements shift at each stage of growth, and the consultants who understand those obligations need to be in the conversation from the start."
Q: Your team has cited a 22% overspend tied to reactive maintenance. Beyond the numbers, what are the hidden costs to the science itself?
A: "Emergency repairs and premium pricing on rushed sole-source parts are the costs that show up in the budget. The deeper damage plays out differently.
A planned service takes a machine down for a day or two. An unplanned failure can stretch to three weeks or three months—the part needs ordering, the replacement needs qualifying, and the science waits. In a regulated environment with study timelines and filing deadlines, that kind of delay ripples well beyond the lab.
Researcher trust takes the same hit. When a piece of equipment has a spotty maintenance history, scientists start hedging—running experiments far more times than the protocol requires because they don't trust the result. Or they'll point at a unit in the corner: 'don't use that one, it's wonky, use this one.' That's capex sitting idle because nobody has confidence in it.
Cold storage is where this hits hardest. Beyond that it depends on the workflow—robotics, specialty analyzers, HPLC systems. When one of those goes down and the science stops with it, you're describing a threat to the business, not a maintenance problem."
Q: Flagship's model promises a shift from reactive to predictive operations, but that transition starts with data infrastructure. What does a viable asset baseline look like?
A: "The starting point isn't glamorous: a list. Not 'here are the models of equipment we own,' but a detailed record—serial numbers, calibration history, manufacturer preventive maintenance schedules, and the MEP and dimensional specs for every asset. Once that information lives in one place, it can feed a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) and become the foundation for predictive planning.
The same principle extends beyond equipment. When a scientist asks procurement how many pipette tips the lab consumes per quarter, the answer is often a stack of POs with no breakdown—no visibility into the usage pattern. Meanwhile the lab manager holds the equipment detail, procurement holds the purchasing history, and neither has sight of what facilities is tracking on maintenance. Until those streams converge, predictive planning has nothing to predict from."
Q: Flagship's Science-Ready Assessment is positioned as consultative rather than corrective. When you run one on a lab that believes it's operating well, what do you usually surface?
A: "The anxiety going in is that we're going to walk through and catalog dysfunction. That's not what happens. The Science-Ready Assessment covers 29 criteria across logistics, equipment, chemicals, and consumables—it's a structured conversation about how the lab operates, not an audit. We're walking into a facility that's supporting day-to-day science, and that part is almost always working.
What we surface is where the stress tests are missing. Is the equipment maintenance documentation sitting in a central database the whole team can access, or on someone's personal drive? If the one person who orders supplies is out for two weeks, what's the backup plan? We give good scores for what's in place, then push on what happens when something goes wrong.
Cost constraints are real. You can't always hold a spare instrument on standby or keep redundant supplies stocked. But you can have a plan. If specialty pipette tips come from a single supplier, have you identified an alternate? If that instrument goes down, is there a longer workflow that keeps the science moving?
Most of the time the response is, 'good point, we hadn't thought about that.' That's the value—we've turned up something before it became a problem."
Q: What is the one thing you find yourself telling lab directors about facility operations that they rarely hear from anyone else?
A: "Facility management has to be part of research operations, not a service that gets called when something breaks. It belongs in the conversation when the lab is planning a scale-up or bringing in a new instrument.
We've consulted on situations where a team has a new piece of equipment ready to ship, the calibration plan is in place, the qualification documentation is built—and no one has measured the space or confirmed the power infrastructure. You ask who's handling that and the room goes quiet.
It comes from seeing the same pattern from both sides. As a bench scientist, you experience the consequences: equipment that arrives in a space nobody prepared for it, facilities consulted the day before installation. On the service side, you watch it repeat across organizations of every size and maturity level.
It happens at mature organizations as often as growing ones. Facility checkpoints belong on the same list as experimental protocols. When a lab runs that way, the science doesn't wait on the infrastructure."
Hear more from J.P. at Lab Manager's Leadership Summit, April 20–22.
