Global Diagnostic Testing Company Focuses on Making Audits Easier

Maintaining Life-Saving Assets

A global diagnostic testing company and its team of 700+ employees utilize more than 2,500 pieces of highly sophisticated equipment to provide life-changing testing services that help physicians treat seriously ill patients.  

Since 2016, the company has relied on Nuvolo to manage planned and corrective maintenance on this mission-critical fleet of equipment. The outcome has been greatly improved efficiency, uptime, and a lot less paperwork. A portion of the critical testing devices are very complex such as sample-handling robots, but according to one of the system architects, “Even the smaller devices need to be properly calibrated and managed. If there’s an issue with a patient’s test (which is rare, but does happen), the maintenance history of that device will be highly scrutinized.”

Nuvolo is an important partner for the entire service management lifecycle of the company’s testing equipment fleet and supporting assets. When a new piece of equipment is received, inventoried, and deployed by the service engineering team, its planned maintenance work orders are automatically generated. Lab workers also have access to a portal where they can report equipment issues, from which corrective maintenance work orders are auto-generated and assigned to the appropriate technician. Everyone that touches a piece of test equipment from the moment it’s deployed to the day it’s decommissioned, is recorded in Nuvolo as the single, authoritative system of record. 

The company estimates its average audit time has decreased from about a week to a day since deploying Nuvolo.

Audit Coming Up?  No Sweat.

An important value that Nuvolo delivers is improved service management efficiency. The company is also very thankful for the application’s comprehensive reporting and easy access to data in the event of an audit. During a typical year, the company is subject to multiple audits, including ISO and CLIA (Clinical Laboratory Improvements Amendment). The company estimates its average audit time has decreased from approximately five business days to one since deploying Nuvolo. Explains one of the company’s Senior System Architects,

“When an auditor asks for a basic piece of information and you walk her to a file cabinet or spend hours sifting through spreadsheets, it invites 10 more questions. But when they ask for something and you pull 10 pages of detail from the Nuvolo system with a few clicks, they quickly become confident that you’re on top of things, greatly reducing the duration of the audit.”

Business Objectives Achieved?  Check.

Ultimately, Nuvolo’s flexibility contributed tangibly to the achievement of the company’s business objectives.

“Nuvolo has allowed us to configure our service management platform to be tailored to our exact needs and exceed our business aspirations,” notes the company’s Service Engineering Manager. “The days of manual data analysis are over. Our goal is to allow our team to dedicate more time to patient treatment planning. We’re introducing a new service to monitor biopsies. This allows us to capture more blood sample data in our systems without any increase in man hours to support. We are also positioned to secure more industry accreditations thanks to the efficiencies gained in our compliance management processes. Nuvolo is important to our team.”