ALMA 2019 Minneapolis - 40 Yrs of Empowering Lab Leaders to Achieve Excellence

Does your organization have more analytical work than it can possibly do?  Is analytical perceived as the bottleneck for rapid progress on business projects?  Do you have so much work that your analytical organization can never seem to get to future planning and competency development?  You are not alone. This talk will address the creation, maintenance and growth of alternative sourcing strategies and networks utilizing contract research organizations, universities, government labs, and more.  The talk will cover the following specific topics:

• Developing an Effective Alternative Sourcing Strategy
• Selling the Plan to Your Customers
• Types of Partners & Relationships and Determining Best Fit
• Addressing Stumbling Blocks in Implementation
• Critical Processes Needed
• Continuous Growth and Development of Partnerships

This talk is based on experience with creating, implementing and managing alternative sourcing strategies for analytical and regulatory work in several organizations.  It is intended to stimulate creativity in thinking about how your own organization currently approaches its total workload, provide a useful framework for moving forward, and tap into the wisdom of the conference participants.

Tropical Storm Allison hit the Houston metropolitan area on June 5th, 2001, proving that storms do not need to be hurricanes to cause massive damage to research facilities. Tropical Storm Allison dropped 32 trillion gallons of water, causing deadly flooding. Thirty-three thousand people needed emergency shelter after Allison and there was $5 billion in damage. Approximately $1.5 billion in damage caused by Allison was to the Houston Medical Center (1). The University of Texas Medical School experienced severe flooding. The basement of the Medical School building was completely filled with water, as well as half way up the first floor. This resulted in the massive loss of research animals, who were housed in the basement. In addition, elevators were no longer functional, resulting in an inability to get liquid nitrogen supply tanks to laboratories located on upper floors. The flooding also destroyed back-up generators, also housed in the basement, leaving liquid nitrogen auto-fill units, -20 and -80 freezers without any power. This led to massive loss of valuable, irreplaceable, research samples, reagents and cell lines. I was a laboratory manager for a large research lab located in the Medical School building when Allison hit Houston. Many lessons were learned during this event, as well as subsequent years of experience working in medical research laboratories in both Houston and Miami. This presentation will address lessons learned as well as how to prepare your lab for disasters.