Successful Automation Starts with a Good Plan
Implementing automation into your lab processes can initially seem time-intensive and costly. Yet, much like building a house, careful and detailed upfront planning can ease later steps and help to maximize returns. Even simple manual tasks should be carefully mapped, planned, and calibrated to ensure that laboratory automation can ultimately complete assigned tasks with a high degree of accuracy and minimal errors.
And when all is said and done, considering all the time, effort, and expense that it takes to install and maintain lab automation and associated devices, it’s natural to want maximum return on your investment.
From our years of experience automating laboratory processes across the life sciences, we recommend three strategies, outlined below, to measurably improve the automation within your laboratory, maximize lab efficiency, and ensure organizational success.
Align Your Lab Automation with Team Goals
One of the best ways to maximize your laboratory output is to first ensure that your laboratory automation projects are aligned with your organization’s goals and overall mission.
What do we mean by this?
The internal team responsible for considering an automated solution is likely an aggregate of multiple departments: Research and Development, Engineering, IT, Procurement, Legal, Finance, and even the Executive Suite. Team members from these departments are bringing their valuable department-specific perspectives to the automation project. R&D may be chiefly focused on robust throughput, whereas legal may scrutinize fine details in a contract, and so on.
With this many varied perspectives, exploratory questions may help to align everyone on the same page. Here are some example questions to spark your initial internal conversations:
- What are you looking to achieve through automation?
- How will automation improve your science, process, team, or contribute to the overall organization?
- What kind of automated solution is possible in terms of technology, workflow, budget, facilities, etc.?
- What additional software and hardware are needed? How will our existing software and hardware work with the proposed automated system? Are there any limitations?
- How is the workflow or automated solution expected to change over time (i.e., in the next 5 years)?
Questions such as these can help to define immediate and future expectations (i.e., 1-5 years) and align the team. Thoughtfully discuss which automation projects are most conducive to achieving your organizational goals. Targeting specific processes where automation benefits are clearly measurable can help the team to understand how automation will improve lab operations.
All this information helps the team to craft a detailed and measurable plan that is paramount to guide the rest of the project.
This initial strategy can feel daunting, but you are not alone. HighRes experts are well-versed in the multiple perspectives and multi-faceted details that go into planning automation projects. Contact your experienced local HighRes representative for personalized guidance and helpful tips through the planning stage.
Power Productivity and Efficiency through Connectivity
While multiple automation platforms are each more effective than manual methods, they can still create bottlenecks and variability if manual transfers are necessary between these distinct, disparate “islands”.
For example, a fragmented workflow might have segments that are dependent upon results from an earlier step. This causes breakdowns as certain parts of the workflow might need to be conducted at specific times of the day.
Instead, unify all your procedures into a connected workflow through hardware and software. In addition to accelerating yield and output, you can schedule each step so you don’t have to worry about the status of your workflow segment. Instead, you’ll be confident that your workflows are running in coordination with each other.
As your needs evolve, the right automated system can incorporate additional devices and software without sacrificing connectivity. Even if devices are located in separate rooms or floors, collaborative robots, or “cobots” can connect them through magnetic rail or mobile sample conveyance systems.
Leverage All Your Gathered Data
With each moment that your experiments progress, they’ll continually produce valuable data on your lab output and operations. From primary assay results to event timings, well-transfer data, and other metadata, each of your operations is constantly producing valuable information streams. Collecting, analyzing, and acting on insights that stem from these precious kernels of information can be an enormous boost to your lab’s productivity and total capacity.
With a successful automation deployment, your laboratory will transform into an efficient “data factory”. Modern whole lab automation software solutions, such as Cellario, can help. In addition to collecting all scientific, event-based, and meta, data on a large scale, Cellario packages and seamlessly transfers these data into your preferred downstream analysis tool to produce actionable insights and recommendations.
When your automation hardware is combined under Cellario’s whole lab automation umbrella, your lab will reap instant and significant benefits.
Getting the Most Out of Your Laboratory Automation
When you’re striving to maximize the full potential of your lab’s automation, taking the right steps towards device and system unification, data and metadata collection, and goal alignment can all ensure that your automation will truly advance your organization’s output and productive capacity.
To learn more about the benefits that automation can bring to your lab, we invite you to reach out to our team at HighRes to discuss your vision of success in lab automation, and how we can help you to reach this goal.
Revision: BL-DIG-190131-01_RevC