14 ANALYTICAL AND LABORATORY EQUIPMENT
Fig. 2. Reaping the potential benefits of the paperless lab.
employee’s salary is $75K, the company is wasting approximately $51/hour/per employee, or $107K annually per employee. A 10 per cent reduction in documentation effort for seven people translates to $77K per year, and a 20 per cent reduction translates to $154K per year (Fig. 2).
data they need. Data is disaggregated across the organisation, both internally (R&D, manufacturing, geographic, functionally, etc) and externally (contract companies, suppliers, research institutes, etc). To exacerbate the problem, new solutions (tablets and mobile devices) further complicate the integration issue.
Keeping these systems separated fails to maximise your investment and introduces unnecessary inefficiencies and errors. In addition to not achieving expected ROI, you may not be able to find the information you need or view your data in a way that
“To keep pace with technology advancements in and out of the laboratory environment, your investment in a paperless lab solution should be able to offer access to raw data and instruments from any web browser or mobile device.”
Imagine what you could do if you also reduced the amount of time your employees spend manually collating reports, preparing samples, performing calculations, and performing other laborious activities. What could your company do with savings potential like this? Te key is your scientists and lab personnel will be able to spend more time on value-added activities that generate revenue.
Why go paperless now? None of this is new information. Companies have always recognised the potential benefit of integration across the enterprise. It wasn’t until recently, in a continuing effort to reduce costs, that companies have turned their attention to automating laboratory processes and/or instrumentation and integrating that data with existing ERP, LIMS, ELN and CDS systems, among others.
Te problem is that these tools and technologies are, if left unconnected, accessed separately, creating islands of information. Compiling data from multiple systems is laborious, and users will often resort to spreadsheets in order to access the
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enables fast and informed decisions. What is the end result? Companies are left with significant exposure, from compromised product quality to delayed decision making to releasing bad products into the market.
How to select a solution As you consider your options for creating a tightly-integrated paperless lab, look for a vendor that combines a solid methodology for analysing your existing workflows, state of the art technology to move your lab operations to optimum efficiency, and comprehensive services to implement the paperless lab and support your company’s ongoing needs.
Implementing any solution should begin with a methodology – a comprehensive consultation to assess your organisation’s existing laboratory automation, instrument integration and workflow. Te assessment should highlight potential ROI and operational gains, and deliver a plan for addressing where current workflow relies on human intervention (often the cause of bottlenecks or errors).
On the technology front, the offering you select should leverage your organisation’s existing investments, even if they’ve been purchased from a variety of commercial vendors.
Te ideal solution should integrate instruments and equipment, connecting data sources with data destinations via a single interface. State of the art integration middleware can translate disparate instrument languages and convert raw data to a vendor-neutral storage format for data archiving.
To keep pace with technology advancements in and out of the laboratory environment, your investment in a paperless lab solution should be able to offer access to raw data and instruments from any web browser or mobile device.
And last but not least, your solution provider should offer pre- and post- implementation consultative services to ensure the paperless environment is continuously optimised as the lab environment changes or as your business needs require.
Conclusion If your company has made significant investments in enterprise and laboratory tools, technologies and solutions but you’re not reaping the ROI or seeing the improvements in productivity, efficiencies and data management that such investments promised, the paperless lab concept deserves serious consideration. Not only can such an integrated, seamless environment improve compliance and quality by eliminating data silos and connecting islands of information across the enterprise, but it can free up your scientists and laboratory professionals to spend more time on value-added research, new product development or other activities that bring revenue to your business.
Enter 14 or ✔ at
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Susan Najjar is the Director of Marketing for the Informatics business at Thermo Fisher Scientific, Chelmsford, MA, USA.
www.thermoscientific.com/paperlesslab
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