Who owns the electron microscope after the grant ends?
Major instruments in Bangladeshi universities are rarely lost to technical failure. They are lost to governance. How to choose an operating model, name a custodian, fund the running cost and write the right terms into the purchase order.
The instrument arrives on a research grant with two years left to run. It is installed, it produces the data behind three papers, and the student who learned to drive it graduates. The grant closes. The service contract is not renewed, because the recurrent budget has no line for it. Eighteen months later a detector needs one part, the quotation goes to a committee with no fund to draw on, and a working instrument sits under a dust sheet in a locked room. That is the most common way a major instrument is lost in a Bangladeshi university, and not one step in it is technical.
Choose the operating model before the purchase order
Single investigator instrument. One group owns it, runs it and pays for it. Works for instruments that are cheap to run and quick to learn, and only for as long as that investigator is present.
Departmental instrument with a named custodian. Shared within the department, one technical officer responsible, booking by a diary anybody can see. Suits mid-range instruments with moderate running costs.
Central facility with a trained operator and charged access. Users either submit samples or are trained to a defined level, the facility charges for use, and the income funds maintenance. This is the only model that reliably survives a change of staff.
The rule of thumb is straightforward: the more expensive the instrument and the more the result depends on operator skill, the further towards a staffed facility you have to move. An electron microscope, a Raman system or a thermal analysis suite operated by whoever happens to be free that week produces inconsistent data and a short service life. Settle the model before the tender, because it changes the training you buy, the spares you buy, and whether the institution needs to create a technical post at all.
A custodian is a person with hours, not a title
The most common failure in shared instrument governance is that responsibility is assigned to a department rather than to a person, which means it is assigned to nobody. Name a custodian and a deputy, write down what they are responsible for, and take those hours out of their other workload. A custodian carrying a full teaching load will do the urgent thing, and instrument maintenance is never the urgent thing until it is far too late to be maintenance.
What the role should actually cover, written down and agreed:
Daily and weekly checks, and the log they are recorded in.
Consumable stock, and reordering before the last one is used rather than after.
The relationship with the service engineer, including raising faults and keeping the fault history.
Training users and signing them off against a defined checklist.
Holding software licences, passwords and account administration, so that none of it leaves the institution with a graduating student.
Budget the running cost as a recurrent line
The capital case is normally argued carefully. The running case is often not argued at all. Before the purchase, list every recurring cost and get it into a recurrent budget line rather than into a project that is going to end.
Service contract, or a realistic call out and repair budget if you decide against a contract.
Instrument specific consumables: filaments, apertures, detectors with a finite life, gases, cryogens and reference standards.
Calibration, certification and any performance verification the instrument needs.
Ancillary consumables that belong to the instrument rather than to the building: chiller fluid and filters, vacuum pump oil, air filters.
Uninterruptible supply batteries, which in a hot room reach the end of their life sooner than the datasheet assumes.
Software licences and support renewals, including anything the instrument PC depends on.
Electricity, which for a large instrument plus its cooling is not a rounding error.
A contingency for one significant repair across the instrument's working life.
A useful test before signing: if nobody can say today where the money for the next filament comes from, the instrument is not funded. It has merely been purchased.
Charging that funds maintenance without killing use
Set at least two rates. An internal academic rate, deliberately subsidised so that students actually use the instrument, and an external or industrial rate set at full cost recovery.
Publish the rates and the booking rules. Opaque access is what makes a shared facility both unpopular and underused, and an underused facility loses its own budget argument.
Ring-fence the income so it cannot be swept into general funds. This is where most public institution facilities fail, and it is worth settling with the finance office in writing before the instrument is ordered rather than after the first invoice.
Where the institution's rules make a ring-fenced account impossible, negotiate a fixed annual maintenance allocation instead, approved for several years at a time. An agreed allocation beats a promise to fund repairs as they arise.
Do not try to make a profit. A facility that prices itself out of use has no usage figures to defend itself with at the next budget round.
Pursue industrial work for the second reason as well as the first. It brings a maintenance income, and it builds a service relationship that outlasts changes in academic staff.
Access, training tiers and the culture around faults
Sample submission. The user does not touch the instrument. Right for occasional users, and for anything where one mistake is expensive.
Trained user under supervision. Can run the routine modes with the custodian present or reachable.
Independent user, signed off in writing against a defined checklist, with an individual account and, where justified, out of hours access.
Custodian and service level, covering alignment, calibration and anything that opens the instrument.
Alongside the tiers, set one cultural rule and hold to it: whoever breaks something must report it immediately, and is not penalised for reporting it. Concealed faults are what turn a repair into a replacement. An operator who keeps running a damaged stage for another fortnight because they are afraid of the consequences will cost the institution more than any training programme it could have run.
The service contract question, answered honestly
Full cover, labour only and pay per call are three different bets, and the right one depends on the instrument rather than on a general policy.
Full cover suits complex instruments with expensive single source parts, where one detector failure costs more than several years of contract.
Labour only, or a call out arrangement, suits instruments whose parts are readily available and whose failures are usually simple.
No contract at all is a legitimate choice for simpler instruments with locally available parts and a competent technician, provided a repair budget genuinely exists.
Read the response time definition carefully. Response usually means acknowledgement, not attendance, and attendance by an engineer who needs a visa and a flight is a very different proposition from attendance by an engineer already based in Dhaka. Ask specifically what happens when the instrument is installed outside Dhaka.
Ask whether remote diagnostics are included and what network access they require, because the IT department will have to agree it and that conversation goes better before a fault than during one.
Ask what spares the supplier holds in the country. A short response time with no local parts produces a fast visit followed by a long wait.
What to write into the purchase so the facility works in year five
A stated number of people trained, named by role rather than by individual, with a refresher after several months of real use.
A recommended spares list quoted at the time of the order, with a lead time written against each item.
Service manuals and the error code list, not only the user manual.
Remote support terms, and what they cost once the warranty ends.
Software licence terms after the warranty, including the answer to a question people forget to ask: does the instrument still operate if the licence lapses?
Initial calibration and the arrangement for recurring calibration.
Site services ordered in parallel: uninterrupted power, cooling and exhaust, commissioned and proven before the instrument arrives rather than chased afterwards.
Every one of these is easier to obtain while a purchase order is unsigned than at any point afterwards. How readily a supplier answers them in writing, before the order, is the most reliable indication you will get of what support is going to look like in year five.