Andrés Lara lives in a permanent state of alert, but he hides it well thanks to his affable and calm demeanour. Whether it’s a sudden breakdown or a facility upgrade, he always finds a solution. His ability to solve problems on the fly and coordinate the team guarantees the maintenance activity of the PCB, covering an area of 100,000 m².

As head of Maintenance, what does your day-to-day work consist of, and how do you organise yourself and your team?

My day-to-day work is divided equally between management tasks in the office and field work with operators and users, resolving incidents and coordinating needs with other areas. We spend 60% of our time on corrective maintenance. There are three of us in the in-house team, and the rest of the service is outsourced. There are always at least two maintenance staff available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Even on weekends and public holidays.

What are the most frequent incidences and how many do you deal with per day?

To put a number on it, we manage around 9,000 incident work orders per year and log around 40,000 maintenance hours annually. The most frequent incidents in a working day are mainly related to electricity. One of the most common problems is utility outages. Fortunately, we have generators that are activated when an outage occurs, but micro-outages can affect laboratories, especially when processes are running overnight or for several days. To avoid this, we have almost 100 UPS (uninterruptible power supply) systems for critical equipment, which allow the equipment to continue to function when there is an outage, thanks to the batteries.

What are the main concerns in specialised facilities such as laboratories and stables in terms of maintenance at the PCB?

Laboratories account for 80% of maintenance work, mainly in the Hèlix, Cluster I and Cluster II buildings, as they have the most facilities. In laboratory areas, each space requires a separate air conditioning unit to control temperature and humidity to ensure safety and proper operation. The stables, which between them total almost 1,600 m², have critical environmental conditions for the animals, and for this reason we have an operator almost exclusively assigned to them. This goes for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) equipment as well, because it has a magnet that must maintain a very stable temperature and cannot vary by more than two or three tenths of a degree.

Do you have any anecdotes or unusual situations that you have had to face in your daily activity?

I remember when we started, and we only had Cluster I and Tower D, an isolated building. Everything was under construction and Tower D was supplied from a transformer station, where we now have the entrance to the car park. One weekend,
there was a power cut in Tower D and the operator went to look at it, thinking it was the electric company. But when he saw that there was an electrical current, he realised that our copper cables had been cut and stolen! But the most surprising thing is that they did it with the power on, which is highly dangerous!