Repair and maintenance are similar to health care interventions: acute and preventive. Nobody ever made a television show about preventive medicine. The drama and entertainment show a near-miraculous rescue that saves a life in sixty minutes, including commercials. The handsome doctor receives the admiration of all concerned.

In a laboratory setting, do you want important lab equipment to fail at the worst time? It’s never a good time, especially when your boss is upset because the spectrophotometer is not working. It's not as entertaining, is it? And when you get the equipment up and running, no one gives you admiring glances.

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Let's face it: the routine of keeping lab assets up and running is good. Drama is bad.

If you want to keep things boring, you need to perform regular equipment maintenance on a recommended schedule, at a minimum. More frequent maintenance may be necessary with heavier use or extreme operating conditions. This leads to an inescapable conclusion: prevention, in the form of routine maintenance, is almost always less expensive and more manageable than unplanned repairs.

Effective asset management for lab operations depends on several considerations:

• How critical is the piece of lab equipment to the workflow?
• What is the volume of activity dependent upon that equipment?
• How costly is the maintenance?
• What is the replacement cost of the instrument?
• What does it cost to track the usage and performance of the asset?

Let’s explore these questions in the context of available maintenance strategies.

Service contracts

You may consider a service contract for mission-critical lab equipment, especially those assets supporting core workflows. This approach is especially helpful when the maintenance is too specialized for your team or when parts and supplies are too expensive to keep in inventory. Factoring in the high replacement cost of the equipment makes proactive maintenance a top priority, regardless of whether the asset is leased or owned.

Additionally, if the lab equipment tracks usage data, your maintenance provider should supply reports on scheduled maintenance, system usage, and upcoming service needs. If it doesn't, collaborate with your payroll or accounting teams to log labor hours associated with the equipment, thereby capturing utilization trends for asset performance management.

Not all assets require service contracts. Simpler or non-critical equipment may benefit from less formal approaches, such as scheduled internal maintenance or on-demand external service.

Pay as you go

In this approach, lab assets receive maintenance only when needed. This is ideal for lower-risk lab equipment that supports less of the lab’s workload. You may be able to perform some maintenance tasks internally and outsource the rest via scheduled service calls.

This model works well when you have multiple units of the same type. If one fails, your total capacity isn’t significantly reduced. However, if several fail at once, it can severely impact throughput. In such cases, asset tracking and diligent recordkeeping become essential, especially for high-usage items.

Many lab asset management apps now allow teams to track maintenance status, job progress, and spare parts inventory via mobile devices. These tools can also notify you about warranty coverage and help guide replacement decisions when maintenance is no longer cost-effective.

Do it yourself

Routine equipment maintenance can often be handled by in-house staff, especially for tasks that are straightforward and well-documented. Outsourcing these may not be justifiable unless they contribute directly to revenue (e.g., billable hours or reimbursable services).

Your asset management system should enable you to log time spent, track which unit was maintained, and capture whether that work was associated with a specific project or deliverable.

Depending on the complexity of the maintenance task, you should also document each step performed. Over time, this detail helps highlight patterns, predict potential failures, and improve the lab’s ability to plan future maintenance activities.

Replacement

Sometimes, the best course of action is to replace an asset rather than continue repairing it. Before making that call, perform a cost-benefit analysis:

1. Would maintenance extend the lab equipment’s useful life?
2. Has the cumulative maintenance cost met or exceeded the cost of replacement?

If repairs no longer justify the expense, replacement is a sound business decision. Some consumable items or low-cost instruments may not be designed for long-term use and should be categorized accordingly in your laboratory asset management plan.

Driving smarter lab asset decisions

Regardless of your chosen maintenance strategy—service contract, pay-as-you-go, DIY, or replacement, the underlying system should help lab managers:

1. Document maintenance time and cost.
2. Identify recurring issues or outliers.
3. Track maintenance trends across all equipment.
4. Use data to drive repair and replacement decisions.
5. Compare outcomes to expectations and adjust accordingly.

Effective repair and maintenance management in the lab means choosing the right approach for each piece of equipment based on its criticality, cost, and workload. Whether you rely on service contracts, pay-as-you-go arrangements, or in-house efforts, preventive maintenance nearly always trumps reactive repairs. Tracking usage data, time spent, and variability helps uncover inefficiencies and informs better planning and budgeting. While replacement is sometimes the right call, most outcomes improve when lab managers actively monitor asset performance. A boring lab is a functional lab, and thoughtful maintenance planning is how you keep it that way.