On 13th March, Suvi Paananen, Project Manager and Team Lead for Mylab’s Delivery Team, had only been back in the office for four days after maternity leave when Mylab transferred to remote working. While employees were busy arranging connections and organising remote working practices, Mylab started to receive a wide range of requests from customers all across Finland.
It took me by surprise that requests were starting to roll in so soon at a rate of several orders per day. Meanwhile, Team Leads were busy organising, communicating and implementing assignments from home as well as they could. Both we and our customers were hesitant about how the pandemic would affect ongoing or planned projects.
New notifications, equipment and tests
A great deal of the requests involved analyser connections, because hospitals and laboratories have purchased new equipment either for covid-19 virus diagnostics or excluding other diseases. In addition, new tests have been added to existing analysers. Initially, Mylab worked on getting communicable disease notifications sent out without delay from laboratory information systems to The Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare.
In normal conditions, communicable disease notifications used to be checked manually and sent within a couple of days. Now we have automated data transfer and covid-19 test results are sent the same day, Paananen says.
The spring has been busy for Project Manager Juha Piittala as well. Some of the new equipment connections have required software development from Mylab. As a result of covid-19 analytics, our customers have acquired equipment that has not previously been connected to Mylab’s laboratory information systems.
Numerous customers have thanked us for rapidly implementing new connections and getting test results transferred, Piittala says.
More employees to meet growing development needs
According to Paananen, the covid-19 pandemic has affected other ongoing projects surprisingly little. Some deployments have been postponed and some new projects are on hold until the situation is more stable. She thinks that the shift to remote working has been easier than anticipated and projects have progressed surprisingly well despite both Mylab employees and representatives of customer organisations working from home. Paananen believes that even if faced with a new wave of the covid-19 pandemic, there will not be as many new customer projects.
Some of the covid-19 projects are still underway and we continue to implement equipment connections, but in my opinion, customers have sufficient capacity. I believe that they can cope with their expanded capacity well into the future.
In addition to customer equipment capacity, during late spring Mylab expanded its work force. Mylab hired nearly 20 new employees during the hectic covid-19 pandemic. New competent developers meet the company’s growing development needs.