Explore the Agenda
8:15 am Check In & Coffee
8:55 am Chair’s Opening Remarks
Elevating Leadership & Workforce Resilience to Enable Sustainable Scientific Productivity
9:00 am The LAFM Exchange
Where the industry sets the agenda – no presentations, no sales pitches, just conversations.
The conversations will now shift from the stage to the audience and wider community. A QR code will be on the screen, and you will allow submit the biggest challenge that you’re currently facing- and remember, a problem shared is a problem halved, so please share the biggest obstacle you’re facing.
We will collate all the challenges and bring them into 6 broad themes. These will then be randomly allocated to separate roundtables where we will dig into the challenge through 3 vital questions:
- What is the why behind the why for this challenge?
- What solutions have we thrown at this challenge and why or why not have they been successful?
- What is the one high-value action that can be done to eradicate this challenge?
Facilitated by the Chair
9:45 am Designing Lean, Fit-for-Purpose Lab Operations to Scale Without Overengineering
- Streamline and consolidate facilities, engineering, and operational functions to build agile, cost-efficient structures
- Right-size system maturity to match organizational stage, avoiding unnecessary complexity while maintaining compliance
- Navigate trade-offs in early-stage growth to balance scalability, efficiency, and operational resilience
10:15 am Morning Break & Networking
Track A
Track A: Running the Site
Overcoming long-term site sustainability, regulatory pressure, ESG mandates, and capital decision-making when investment dollars are scarce.
11:00 am Discover: Prioritizing Capital Investments Using Risk-Based Frameworks to Protect Critical Infrastructure
- Maximizing return on limited capital budgets by directing investment toward the highest-risk infrastructure assets, avoiding low-impact spend while preventing failures that drive downtime, emergency repairs, and lost research output
- Reducing unplanned outages and lifecycle cost creep by using risk-based prioritisation to address ageing, high-criticality systems before they become operational or compliance liabilities
- Enabling faster, more defensible capital decisions by applying transparent, data-driven frameworks that align engineering, finance, and leadership around where investment delivers the greatest protection and long-term value
11:20 am Discover: Leveraging Lifecycle Data to Optimize Instrument Strategy & Reduce Costs
- Tracking instrument utilization and downtime to identify inefficiencies and drive smarter purchasing decisions
- Informing decommissioning and new site buildouts with real usage data to avoid overinvestment and improve planning
- Delivering significant cost savings through a scalable internal lifecycle management solution
11:40 am Discover: Redesigning Facilities Outsourcing Models to Restore Accountability, Speed Response Times, & Reduce Hidden Risk
- Reducing costly delays and rework by clarifying ownership, escalation paths, and decision rights across multi-vendor outsourcing models, eliminating offs that slow response and increase downtime
- Improving service responsiveness without increasing spending by restructuring vendor governance, performance metrics, and contract scope to focus on outcomes that directly support research continuity
- Mitigating hidden operational and compliance risk by strengthening oversight of third-party providers, ensuring consistent execution, documentation, and accountability across sites and service partners
12:00 pm Develop: Shared Q&A
12:20 pm Action: Roundtable Session
Collaborate to identify practical starting points, potential barriers, and strategies for making necessary change.
Interactive Peer-Led Discussion Facilitated by the Chair
Track B
Track B: Running the Lab
Advancing operational reality, showing how labs can prepare for automation and AI without overreach or compliance risk.
11:00 am Discover: The Adventure Continues – A Glimpse Into the Future of Lab Performance & the Value it Can Unlock for Your Organization
- Purpose-built apps on one shared foundation deliver value individually while compounding – each module you switch on makes the next more valuable
- ”Start small and grow” is real: begin with a spreadsheet upload and mature into full-service asset management without re-platforming or retraining
- The platform keeps extending – new modules for scientific services, CapEx planning, and task management ship on the same foundation, turning lab operations into a lasting strategic advantage
11:20 am Discover: Pinpointing Where Automation Truly Delivers Value Towards Operational Impact
- Prioritize high impact use cases with real ROI by identifying automation opportunities grounded in data readiness, process stability, and integration feasibility – avoiding costly pilots that fail to scale or deliver measurable benefit
- Drive meaningful workload reduction without added complexity by targeting repetitive, high-volume tasks with clear process ownership, ensuring automation simplifies operations rather than introducing new layers of oversight
- Strengthen risk control while enabling smarter decisions by embedding human in the loop models that enhance consistency, auditability, and compliance without compromising accountability in regulated environments
11:50 am Roundtable: From Reactive Firefighting to Proactive Control
- Where are you still firefighting? What recurring failures, disruptions or issues continue to pull your teams into reactive mode, and what is the real operational cost?
- How early can you see problems coming? What leading indicators, data or warning signals could help you anticipate failures and better plan maintenance, staffing and asset availability?
- What would make your operation more predictable? What needs to change to build greater reliability and confidence across R&D, operations and leadership and what has worked for others?
12:30 pm Partner Spotlight: Reserved for Xiltrix
12:40 pm Lunch
Track A
Strengthening operational resilience through risk management, predictive maintenance, and critical decision making.
1:50 pm Discover: Managing Facilities Risk Across In-House, CDMO, & Leased Manufacturing Environments
- Identify the most common hidden failure points, from utilities access and HVAC control to validation handovers and outage communication
- Compare CAPEX ownership vs leasing risk to determine when owning infrastructure delivers greater resilience and regulatory certainty
- Produce a Facilities Risk Ownership Map linking asset control, vendor dependency, escalation authority, and compliance exposure
2:10 pm Discover: Predictive Maintenance in Regulated Manufacturing, Deciding Where it is Safe, Valuable, or Dangerous
- Examine where preventive maintenance still dominates GMP environments and why extending intervals often fails
- Map process, utilities, and equipment signals (SCADA, BMS, CMMS, historians) to identify realistic candidates for predictive approaches
- Produce a Predictive Maintenance Suitability Matrix defining:
- Where predictive methods add value
- Where they should be avoided
- Where hybrid models are appropriate
2:30 pm Develop: Shared Q&A
2:45 pm Action: Roundtable Session
Collaborate to identify practical starting points, potential barriers, and strategies for making necessary change.
Interactive Peer-Led Discussion Facilitated by the Chair
Track B
Enhancing laboratory performance through cost transparency, operational alignment, and reliability-centered maintenance.
1:50 pm Roundtable: Integrating Procurement, Facilities & Lab Operations
- Do you have a clear view of where your money is going? How well are procurement, facilities and lab operations aligned on assets, contracts, demand and the true cost of running the operation?
- Are functional silos slowing down your decisions? When budgets are tight, how do you bring cost, risk and operational impact together to make faster, better-informed trade-offs?
- Who owns the outcome? How can procurement, service delivery and operations work together to create clearer accountability, predictable costs and measurable performance?
2:30 pm Discover: Converting GMP Asset Criticality into Failure-Proof Maintenance & Reliability Strategy
- Apply manufacturing-grade asset criticality frameworks to categorize GMP, utility, and support assets based on downtime cost, compliance impact, and failure consequence
- Translate criticality rankings into maintenance execution decisions, including PM frequency, condition-based strategies, spares policy, and engineering focus
- Produce an Asset-to-Maintenance Execution Map that directly links asset criticality to maintenance workload, staffing priorities, and reliability risk
3:00 pm Afternoon Break
From Siloed Decisions to Shared Operational Direction
3:30 pm Future-Proofing Research Facilities: How UCSF Is Reinventing Support Models to Sustain Biomedical Innovation in Uncertain Times
- Reimagining service delivery at scale: How a new Facilities Services Coverage Model eliminates re-charges, streamlines access, and removes friction for researchers, enabling faster, more predictable support
- Driving resilience through digital innovation: Leveraging APIs and remote temperature monitoring to safeguard critical research assets and maintain continuity despite hiring constraints and resource pressures
- Modernizing operations with AI and communication: Harnessing enterprise ChatGPT and a new asset management approach, while strengthening crisis communication to ensure transparency, alignment, and trust across stakeholders
4:00 pm Panel: Earning Your Seat at the Table – Elevating Leadership Impact in R&D Operations
- Developing the leadership skills and confidence needed to operate as a strategic voice within science-driven organizations
- Aligning closely with scientific priorities to reposition ops from a support function to a critical business partner
- Demonstrating tangible value and influence to accelerate career progression and secure a seat at the leadership table
4:00 pm Designing Lean, Fit-for-Purpose Lab Operations to Scale Without Overengineering
- Streamline and consolidate facilities, engineering, and operational functions to build agile, cost-efficient structures
- Right-size system maturity to match organizational stage, avoiding unnecessary complexity while maintaining compliance
- Navigate trade-offs in early-stage growth to balance scalability, efficiency, and operational resilience