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I am wondering if any of you take a "cores/shared services-like approach" to assigning fees to departments and/or specific labs for their use of the various autoclaves located througout your buildings.

I apprecaite any and all insight, thanks!

Best,

Tom 

Hi Tom,

Hey Tom,

In the College of Agriculture at USU one of our autoclaves is used by multiple departments. Until recently a single department had sole responsibility for maintaining and paying for repairs for the shared unit. In the last year or so though, we have moved to a divided cost system. Our use logs include a place for reporting the department and now the costs of maintenance and repairs are divided between departments based on the percent of cycles used. We do not have any in house repair/maintenance services so we have to contract out. We attempt to have PMs done every 6 months so costs end up being split based on the previous 6 months of use. 

The biggest issues with this are:

• It is based on self reporting so if all users do not log usage consistently (not recording runs, recording multiple failed or stopped runs, inconsistency reporting warmup runs, etc.) it at minimum complicates the process of determining use, and has the potential to severely skew the percent use/responsibility.
• Often a single lab will be responsible for 80-90% of usage in a department, so the whole department ends up paying for the need of a single lab or they have to work out a system to recoup funds from the individual labs.

The advantages of the system are:

• Overall it is simple and easy to administrate on our end.
• This unit has a history of costly repair and maintenance, so covering costs at a department level has felt far more manageable to people than charging per use of the unit.

It's far from perfect but is better than the previous approach. I'm curious to know how others without internal servicing options distribute cost.

Best,

Evan