ANALYTICAL AND LABORATORY EQUIPMENT 13
Delivering on the promise of the paperless lab
Susan Najjar demonstrates how the paperless lab can improve efficiency, compliance and quality by integrating data silos and automating laboratory operations.
O
rganisations have made significant investments in enterprise and laboratory tools, technologies and solutions to help improve productivity, better manage data/information and optimise their business processes.
However, the reality is that most companies have not reaped the return on investment (ROI) or efficiency gains that they planned.
What is a paperless lab? A paperless lab integrates the laboratory with the enterprise and automates systems by eliminating paper-based, manual and error- prone processes. While most companies have invested in many instruments and software solutions in the laboratory, manufacturing and the enterprise to improve operations, these systems are not seamlessly integrated, creating data silos, or standalone information repositories that do not communicate with one another.
By automating operations and integrating these individual solutions, organisations can reduce
paperwork, increase efficiency and throughput, automate regulatory compliance, reduce costs, foster collaboration and make faster, better informed business decisions (Fig. 1).
What’s wrong with paper?
Te benefits of using paper are evident. It’s easy to use, convenient, portable and legally defensible; plus, it requires little (or no) user training and supports multiple data types. Unfortunately paper also has some major drawbacks. It introduces security risks, it’s expensive, it’s not searchable, it’s not collaborative, there are significant storage issues and, perhaps most importantly, it’s error prone and susceptible to transcription mistakes. In any process, the handling of paper is almost always a manual (human) activity. And manual activity is inherently prone to errors. At the very best, for every 1,000 results transcribed from an instrument, the human will make, on average, three to six mistakes.
Typical error rates increase to three per 100 transcribed results (or 30
errors for every 1,000 results) if any math or stress is involved. In addition, large volumes of paper- based data are difficult to store and practically impossible to search at a later date.
How costly are manual errors? Imagine, for example, that you have seven people in your lab spending 20 per cent of their time annually writing documents. Tis involves documenting lab tasks (writing docs to communicate results or reviewing documentation), and every one of these activities must be logged and, in some cases, approved by another person.
Imagine if you could reduce those efforts by 10 per cent - this translates to putting 336 hours, or 42 days, back into doing more productive and meaningful work. If you could reduce those same efforts by 20 per cent you could put 672 hours, or 84 days, back into doing more productive and meaningful work.
In terms of cost savings, if each
Fig. 1. Delivering the paperless lab environment.
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