Synchrotron Light Research Institute - SLRI Customer Service
Name of Organization / Company: Synchrotron Light Research Institute, Nakhon Ratchasima, Thailand
Category: Award for the Innovative Use of Technology in Customer Service > Non-Profit
Entry Title: SLRI Customer Service
Essay
Synchrotron Light Research Institute (SLRI) is a public organiz ation, under supervision of Ministry of Science and Technology, the Royal Thai Government, with the mission to provide infrastructure for research and education in synchrotron- based science and technology to the researchers from both academia and industry. Currently, SLRI is a growing facility by aiming to exploit the synchrotron, beamlines, and end- stations to their full potential and to be able to provide services 24/7. New beamline and instruments are under construction indicating a wide range of techniques that will be available at SLRI in the future and be able to support the users from ASEAN countries. Since its operation in 2003, SLRI has attracted over 3,000 project proposals from the research and industrial community and been involved in the generation of over 700 scientific publications that are in high impact journals in their respective fields.
SLRI is a national user facility providing synchrotron radiation and most advanced scientific facilities in the country to researchers in many fields of science and technology, such as material science, chemistry, biology and medicine, environmental science, physics, and engineering. Machine operation and beamtime allocation are typically divided into two periods per year, starting from January to June (period I) and October to December (period II). Access to the synchrotron is free through a competitive application process, if the results are in the public domain. General user beamtime proposal must be submitted through the web- based system, beamapp.slri.or.th, throughout the year.
In the system, scientific experiments to be conducted at SLRI must be described in a beamtime proposal with the details about the amount of beamtime desired on a specific beamline, instrumentation, safety haz ard, preferred date of experiment. Those who are interested in using the facilities can find a more detailed description of the techniques available on the website. All submitted proposals will be technically peer reviewed by proposal review committees (PRC) on their scientific merit. Thus, users are recommended to contact beamline manager or user office division for technical advice before submission. If access is awarded, it is expected that the results will be published. The beamline manager are then responsible for scheduling the beamtime and user office will direct all users of the outcome of their proposals. For further information, SLRI are now providing financial support (local transportation and accommodation) for the users during their experiments at SLRI. Anyone who is interested in applying for the grants can register during online submission.
Two types of proposals can be submitted to conduct experiment at SLRI; non- proprietary and proprietary proposals. The prior should be submitted by principal investigator (PI) or project leader through the beamtime applications described above. The latter needs to be submitted via the Business Development Division at www.slri.or.th/bds/ . However, additional beamtime fee can be charged. For all current and prospective users, the user office is the first point of contact at SLRI to facilitates and support the users with the beamtime application, user agreements, logistical and accommodation arrangement, and more.
Beam service at SLRI is advised by the User Advisory Committee (UAC), who are elected by SLRI user community. UAC is an independent group providing advices and feedback to SLRI on the operation and development of the synchrotron, beamlines and end- stations, proposal evaluation, and related issues. Moreover, the UAC is also responsible for arranging SLRI Annual User Meeting (AUM), which is an occasion to share scientific, technical and practical issues about the synchrotron radiation use. All the comments and feedback will be responded by SLRI in order to improve the service and achieve high customer (user) satisfaction. In addition, users are kindly asked to give feedback via satisfaction survey managed by third party. In 2018, the overall satisfaction is of about 93.80% demonstrating the potential of great customer service provided by SLRI.
Attachments/Links:
URL 1
https://www.slri.or.th/th/service user-statistic.html
URL 2
https://www.slri.or.th/th/first-time-user.html
URL 3
http://dev.slri.or.th/online/thai-users/