QIAGEN

Brian Thoma

Ph.D. holder in Biology, Brian Thoma has completed his post-doctorate fellowship from MD Anderson cancer center. He began his journey in the biotechnology industry with QIAGEN in 2005 as a field service engineer repairing and troubleshooting the medical equipment that QIAGEN sells. Later in 2007, he moved into a leadership role within the field service and continually raised roles and responsibilities over the years. Thoma became the Director of service solutions North America for QIAGEN four years ago. He is responsible for post-sale support, from telephone support to technical service to onsite field service troubleshooting.

He handles repair center depots around the country and manages service contract sales and service administration for billing and invoicing.

According to you, what are the major challenges that the pandemic brought in?

Obviously, everything is influenced and framed by the pandemic. Most companies experienced challenges with the supply chain, whether it is procuring raw material or hiring new talent for the job. Also, it was more challenging to train the workforce as face-to-face interaction was not possible. To deal with this, we have adapted to remote training, but still, it was difficult to deliver the same quality of training to new employees through remote training than face-to-face. Moreover, we are also experiencing challenges while serving our customers as most businesses require proof of the vaccination to enter sites and work on the equipment. Initially, we had several employees who were not vaccinated, which made it difficult for us to service clients the way we have committed to. So we have to be very sensitive moving forward as it is the personal liberty of employees how they feel about vaccination and cannot force them to get vaccinated.

Could you tell us about the project initiative that you are currently working on?

We are still dealing with numerous different challenges that the pandemic brought in, especially with recruitment. We are relying heavily on engaging our current workforce to help us recruit good-fit talent for our company. This is effective as the existing workforce can talk about the company’s work environment, culture, and benefits to individuals and at the same time bring credible talent to the organization. From a training standpoint, we have embraced video conferencing and leveraging the hybrid model for preparing the workforce for the job. For example, we send instruments to where our trainees can gain hands-on experience of the equipment while the trainer directs them remotely. It is proven to be effective than just reading a document or having a completely hands-off experience. We need to take a strategic approach that is appealing to customers on a personal and emotional level. We can engage with them in an empathetic way as even our clients are experiencing similar challenges within their organization. We should be transparent with customers as they appreciate bad news as opposed to no news at all.

So if we can explain why we can’t deliver something on time, they will accept and understand as opposed to not hearing anything at all. We are trying to leverage artificial intelligence to improve our operations and the way we deal with clients.

With these potential disruptions and transformations happening in the industry, where does the industry headed?

Our industry is heavily geared towards life science, delivering service to hospitals, clinics, medical groups, research groups, and nonclinical groups. In my opinion, as an industry, we are moving toward remote diagnostics and predictive analytics diagnostics as we are receiving data from the customer’s instruments automatically. That means we can anticipate the failure even before clients inform us. Consequently, we can proactively reach out to clients and guide them to make the necessary adjustment to the instrument or the software to help mitigate a potential problem in the future or schedule a visit before an actual failure.

It has already become common in the automotive and other major manufacturing industries. Finally, we have also taken steps in the same direction as a supplier for the research and the clinical domains. Everybody expects faster and quicker services. I believe trends such as artificial intelligence and augmented reality will help us in moving forward quickly. Concepts such as augmented reality will become crucial in training as the new workforce entering the industry has different ways of learning and engaging compared to 10 years ago. That is why we have changed the way we deliver training and learning to our employees and technicians. For us to be competitive, we have to make our field people proficient quickly. Meaning, we have to deliver training in a way that speaks to them.

What would be a piece of advice that you want to give for upcoming professionals to be successful in this field?

Don’t expect to have opportunities given to you, but grab your own opportunities. When you see a need—even if it is a need outside the area of your influence—speak up and make suggestions on how that issue can be resolved. Even if your solution isn’t right or feasible, other people will value your commitment and willingness to take a risk. Standing up, getting involved, and sharing ideas make a difference as it stands out to people. In essence, if you want to do a certain job or want your career to go in a particular direction, start behaving like you have that job already and do it, and then the promotion will come