Business Case
Project Statement
The Project Management office in collaboration with Scientific Program Leads offer to return a Principal Investigator’s samples to them 6 months after their project has been completed. If a PI does not want their samples returned they are removed from the freezer and disposed of. It is currently the responsibility of the Supply Chain Coordinator and the Sample Management group to carry out the identification of eligible samples, obtain FedEx account info for generating the shipping labels, and to package and ship the samples. Additional support from instrumentation, ITS/PPS, and Shipping & Receiving departments is required to carry out this task.
Sample storage (SAM) at the JGI is limited and finite. Already in FY17 this freezer storage has reached maximum capacity requiring risky, off-line storage in freezers without tracking capabilities.
Scientific programs like the Fungal & Microbial programs have a policy to retain all samples from completed projects. The Microbial program has it’s own freezer storage on-site. Once projects are complete, samples are removed from the SAM freezer and moved to the Microbial freezer. The Fungal program does not have its own freezer and the current practice is for all complete Fungal samples to be retained in the SAM freezer.
The number of samples that the JGI receives every year increases annually and this is guaranteed to continue in the coming years.
The current process of shipping or trashing of samples is resource intensive and is unsustainable.
Objective Statement
The goal of this project is, at minimum, to devise a more sustainable management of samples from completed or non-active samples on-site or, at best, to eliminate the returning of samples to PI’s upon project completion.
Project Scope