Andrea Horridge, our Technical Support and Quality Manager, discusses all things Aspect in this month’s Q&A
How long have you worked at Aspect and what’s involved with your day-to-day role?
I’ve worked at Aspect for 7 years from when it was only 4 employees and a few customers. Now we are up to 26 staff members, a great many customers from differing sectors (NHS, private diagnostics labs, Veterinary, research, manufacturing, food industry, etc) and we are supporting many different types of equipment spanning multiple diagnostic areas e.g. Microbiology, Haematology, Immunology, Farm serology, food allergen, toxicology testing, lab automation, etc.
Day to day I’m involved with direct technical support, logging and managing the equipment breakdown/support cases, applications support to ELISA Automation customers (writing and amending protocols for Dynex ELISA equipment for various types of ELISA kits), on-site customer training and second level support for Dynex ELISA equipment. I also manage our Quality Management System and our new Quality team to ensure CAPA’s and quality improvement projects are moving forwards.
What do you enjoy most about your job?
The variety of different tasks is good and the team are great. As we have more staff in the office now it is starting to become more social. The flexibility to work from home is invaluable as my commute is quite long and this breaks up the week.
Tell us about any changes within the company that affect your role?
As the company grows, we are steering towards increasing our office staff and creating a more departmentalised structure to carry out specific tasks that have started to outgrow what has been a small company. With investment into a new company CRM and service management system, we should soon be able to work more efficiently and further improve support to customers. This should also make the logging of technical issues and dispatch / scheduling of engineers smoother. As we have two new Quality Specialist’s this year, they are taking on the day to day management of the ISO9001 QMS and inputting major changes to improve systems with preventative and corrective actions. This is of great benefit to the company and myself.
Do you feel the company’s services / products and your role have an impact on healthcare, why and how does this make you feel?
I think we have a direct impact on the labs ability to output patient results on a consistent basis. We strive for the Engineering team to visit instrument breakdown’s the next day, occasionally the same day and we resolve many technical issues with a single site visit in most cases. This gets the lab back up and testing as soon as possible. Also, with advice and troubleshooting over the phone or direct link to customers instruments remotely, we can troubleshoot and resolve issues without the need for an Engineer site visit in some cases, meaning a fix in a very short space of time which impacts upon the uptime of the instrument.