Implementing robotic automation into your lab processes can be time-intensive and costly. Even simple manual tasks need careful planning and calibration to ensure that laboratory robots can successfully complete each task with a high degree of accuracy and minimal errors. After the time, effort, and expense that it takes to install and maintain lab robots and devices, it’s natural to want to maximize the return on your new investments.
From our years of experience performing robotic lab automation here at HighRes, we’ve outlined three strategies that we’ve found to measurably improve your lab automation, maximize productivity and ensure organizational success:
1. Align Your Lab Robotics with Team Goals
One of the best ways to maximize your laboratory output is to first ensure that your robotic automation projects are aligned with your team’s goals and overall mission. Thoughtfully discuss with your team which automation projects are most conducive to achieving your organizational goals. Targeting specific processes where the benefits of automation are clearly measurable can help with understanding which automated processes are working towards improving your lab’s operations.
2. Connectivity powers productivity
While each of your automation platforms is likely to be highly effective on its own, unifying them into a connected workflow, though both hardware and software will accelerate yield and output. When robotic automation is separated into distinct and disparate parts, your workflows can be fragmented and experience a loss in work rate and efficiency.
For example, a disunified workflow might have segments of the workflow depend upon the results of an earlier step. This causes breakdowns as certain parts of the experiment might need to be conducted at specific times of the day. When your automation is completely unified, you won’t have to worry about which step or segment an experiment might be in. Instead, you’ll be confident that your workflows are running in coordination with each other.
3. Leverage All Your Gathered Data
With each moment that your experiments run, they’ll continually produce valuable data on your lab output and operations. From your primary assay results to event timings, well-transfer data, and other metadata on how conditions affect your processes, each of your operations is constantly producing valuable streams of information. Collecting and acting on the insights that stem from these kernels of information can be an enormous boost to your lab’s productivity and total capacity.
Understandably, trying to glean insights from all this data can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive process. This is where automation can be revolutionary. With a successful automation deployment, your laboratory will become a “data factory”. Modern lab automation software like Cellario can help you not only collect but also package and seamlessly transfer data into your downstream analysis tool to produce actionable recommendations. When your robotic hardware is combined with automation software your lab will reap the combined benefits.
Getting the Most Out of Your Laboratory Robotic Automation
When you’re striving to maximize the full potential of your lab’s robotic automation, taking the right steps towards device & system unification, data & 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 what success in lab automation looks like to you, and how we can help get you there.
