Having the right systems in place for each of the primary functions within the laboratory is a critical starting point for digitalizing your workflow, however, unified connectivity between these technologies is what will allow you to transform your operations into the lab of the future.

Transforming your Laboratory Through Connectivity Enables:

• Seamless integration of the entire process workflow
• Facilitates an agile transfer of data and information
• Real-time data and knowledge based decision making
• Collaboration between teams across multiple sites
• Eliminates departmental and data silos
• Real-time data and knowledge based decision making
• Unified role-based user experience for the lab

Achieving this level of connectivity requires a defined set of operating standards across a platform-based cloud enterprise.  Data collection and storage formats, taxonomies and ontologies, processes, and governance of data management just to name a few, are all examples of areas for standardization.  Deploying your system within a cloud enterprise opens the door to future of laboratory computing.  It allows for on-demand access to a shared network of configured computing resources via the internet, enables mobile accessibility in a time of remote work, offers security and flexibility, increases collaboration and allows for easy management of software and hardware life cycles.  As your laboratory grows, cloud computing facilitates the creation of new virtual computers as user demands increase.

As you embark down the path of your digital transformation journey, new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and data science have the ability to further automate and transform processes within the laboratory.  AI learns from existing data, identifies patterns in the new data, and offers the ability to make decisions in real time.  Combining cloud technology with AI can perform more complex tasks with less centralized hardware.

BIOVIA ONE Lab provides a comprehensive platform for all of your informatics needs in a unified lab management solution.  The cloud-based connectivity features within ONE Lab enables you to eliminate manual or paper-based processes, develop turn-key methodologies, automate data review, manage sample inventory, and provide audit trail tracking throughout the entire process.

BIOVIA Pipeline Pilot further optimizes the research innovation process by employing a scalable framework to automate the scientific analysis of data across the enterprise, allowing users to accelerate access to data and easily visualize and report on their research results. It’s deep learning capabilities streamlines the processing and analyzing of image data, while integrating with the relevant numerical, chemical, graphical and textual data across a unified enterprise.

To get the most out of your BIOVIA ONE Lab implementation, it is important to work with a quality informatics consultant who understands the platform, your applications, and your scientific domain, and will work with you to complete the necessary business analysis and requirements gathering surrounding your successful digital transformation journey. Astrix has an experienced team of BIOVIA product experts that can provide services for all your support needs including implementation, instrument and system integration, workflow and method authoring, custom reporting, planning and system administration and user training.

BIOVIA ONE Lab Suite of Products Supported by Astrix:

• Lab Management (Foundation HUB, Task Plan)
• Procedure Execution (Compose, Capture & Review)
• Electronic Lab Notebook (Notebook & Workbook)
• Materials Management (CISPro, Registration)
• Data Science (Pipeline Pilot)

BIOVIA’s leading ONE Lab solution, coupled with the services expertise of Astrix, will provide your laboratory with the foundation you need to accelerate a successful digital transformation program both on-premise and in the cloud.

As the premier BIOVIA Services partner, Astrix provides increased value to customers through cost effective design, implementation and/or integration services leveraging BIOVIA applications and software. If you wish to learn more about Astrix services, or if you wish to discuss your overall laboratory informatics strategy with an Astrix expert, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

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Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELNs) are rapidly becoming a fundamental part of every laboratory operation in industries from pharmaceuticals, to chemicals, to academia, consumer goods and more. By facilitating the storing, accessing, analyzing, reporting and sharing of critical research data, ELNs help to create an effective knowledge base for your organization, streamline the documentation and protection of intellectual property, and help scientists collaborate in increasingly global and networked activities from discovery to manufacturing. That said, implementing an ELN is really just the first step in the information management journey necessary to optimize R&D discovery and development.

Faced with intense pressure to control costs and get more out of R&D investments, many life science companies have turned to outsourcing and contract research to stimulate pipelines. As a result, industry-leading pharma companies are focused on implementing R&D informatics collaboration platforms with integrated ELNs in order to aggregate data and drive research decisions.

While entering new data in their ELN experiments, scientists have to couple the data with results coming from their lab’s instruments, and also record source material ID from their inventory for traceability. They also have to add reference to previous experiments, owned by their company or created by third party labs (CRO, university research, common references such as ACD, etc.). Scientists usually know the source of the external data, but they are missing technical IT expertise to add it to their experiment in their ELN. This blog will illustrate how Pipeline Pilot acts as a bridge to combine the new experiment data and external data.

BIOVIA Workbook

By effectively managing the flow of information, materials and tasks among scientists, instruments and software both within and between labs, BIOVIA Workbook delivers an industry-leading, enterprise ELN for life science companies. More than a simple replacement for paper notebooks, Workbook is a highly adaptable and flexible solution that helps transition from tedious paper and manual processes to a highly efficient and integrated electronic environment in non-GxP and GxP labs.

Workbook can be used across multiple scientific disciplines enabling scientists to create experiment templates based on their specific research needs. Experimental data from different domains can then be consolidated into versioned, shareable and searchable documents that are controlled by document workflows with electronic signatures and audit trails for regulatory compliance. Data can also be captured and viewed in a variety of ways – text, tables, spreadsheets, graphs, charts and more – and can be exported to third-party systems and applications.

Compared to other ELN applications, BIOVIA Workbook allows a quick and smooth interaction with the experiment data. Scientists can rapidly switch between different views of the experiment. It can be configured to add complex rules to verify the data entered in the experiments. In addition, Workbook has strong chemistry capabilities like sub structure search support for synthetic chemistry computation, or structure enumeration.

Key benefits of BIOVIA Workbook include:

• Efficiency improvement through laboratory automatization and acceleration of data entry, processing and reporting
• Advanced searching and browsing capabilities
• Minimization of data errors
• Protection of intellectual property (IP)
• Gain operational and experimental insight through improved knowledge management
• Integrate and automate instrument data capture and processing
• Streamline regulatory compliance
• Implement consistent processes across organizations
• Extensible and customizable

Using Workbook with Pipeline Pilot

Digitalized scientific laboratories are generating more data than ever before, but in order to generate insights from this data, it needs to be examined effectively using accessible tools with advanced analytics. BIOVIA Pipeline Pilot is a graphical scientific authoring application that optimizes the research innovation process, increases operational efficiency and reduces costs for both research and IT. Pipeline Pilot automates the scientific analysis of data, enabling users across the enterprise to rapidly explore, visualize and report research results.

Pipeline Pilot offers a rich and intuitive way to access data from different data sources. It also comes with a lot of different existing Pipeline Pilot example protocols, ready for production use. Scientists or IT personnel can easily build or modify Pipeline Pilot protocols to access their own data or implement custom business rules. In addition, Pipeline Pilot offers a simple way to generate reports.

Pipeline Pilot allows you to:

• Complete projects faster by leveraging existing research and intellectual property and automating routine data gathering and analysis processes
• Uncover knowledge hidden in your data by quickly aggregating and processing massive volumes of structured and unstructured data from multiple disparate research areas
• Encapsulate and deploy best practices to ensure compliance and enable collaboration across your research and development organizations
• Reduce direct research costs

Some BIOVIA products like ChemReg, BioReg, or Insight are directly built on top of Pipeline Pilot. ChemReg or BioReg enables registration of new compounds with corporate specific metadata and rules. You could leverage these rules by invoking ChemReg or BioReg from Workbook, based on the same framework of Workbook and Pipeline Pilot integration. Insight allows you to quickly isolate a subset of your data and visualize it with different dashboards to make decisions. Workbook data can be accessed from Insight.

BIOVIA Pipeline Pilot together with BIOVIA Workbook can dramatically enhance scientific discovery and innovation for your organization. With BIOVIA Workbook, you will get, out of the box, classes and python code to call Pipeline Pilot protocols from Workbook. They can be utilized to add extra buttons to the experiment toolbar to read data from Workbook, pass it to a specific Pipeline Pilot protocol, execute the protocol, and import the results of the protocol execution back to Workbook experiment.

Pipeline Pilot flexibility allows Workbook to provide a wide range of benefits:

• Optimization of Scientifically Aware Data Analysis – Pipeline Pilot allows operators from any programing level to tackle the most complex data processing and analysis tasks. Pipeline Pilot protocols are built using simple drag-n-drop boxes representing processing nodes. These nodes can be data readers, filters, pivoters, etc. and connection between two nodes will translate into data flow. Simply connect the nodes to complete the whole process. By calling such protocol from Workbook, you could easily compute extra properties and add the results to your original experiment.
• Utilize Over 1000 Validated Scientific Components – Pipeline Pilot is the most scientifically-aware visual programming solution on the market. Its library of validated scientific components and best practice workflows cover a broad range of scientific disciplines and provide data management, analysis and reporting capabilities for text, numeric and complex scientific data, including chemical structures, biological sequences and scientific images. This will add extra validation on top of the already rich data constraint available from Workbook.
• Operationalize Scientific Intelligence – Pipeline Pilot’s open and extensible integration framework seamlessly integrates in-house or third-party databases, applications and algorithms. It effortlessly fits into your unique IT environment, securely connecting both on-prem and cloud systems to generate enterprise-wide scientific intelligence. Pipeline Pilot makes it practical to insert instrument data like NMR or chromatography data into your Workbook experiments.
• Leverage Analytics – Pipeline Pilot provides a comprehensive suite of scientifically-aware modeling tools, statistical filters and clustering components for scientific predictive analytics. It helps you go beyond typical data processing and analysis to gain a competitive advantage in today’s data-driven world. Workbook data, across experiments, could be accessed as a data pool, then analyzed and reported though Pipeline Pilot protocols.
• Accelerate the Research Innovation Cycle – Pipeline Pilot protocols can automatically encapsulate and annotate your organization’s best practices. Users can share and re-use processes via web services across your organization to simplify business process automation and standardize operations on an enterprise level.

In addition, Pipeline Pilot can enhance other BIOVIA applications, including, but not limited to, Workbook, Insight, Registration, Discovery Studio, and ScienceCloud. Using specifically designed extension points, Pipeline Pilot can automatically provide computational services, create charts or full reports, be used to load data from files, databases and online resources, and integrate with other applications and instruments to create a unified IT infrastructure.

Beyond Pipeline Pilot Integration

A common, uniform way to access data is through micro webservices. These external webservices often provide an API to perform CRUD operations using ReST technology, with JSON to serialize and deserialize data. Pipeline Pilot already provides components to connect to such webservice endpoints, and translate JSON data packets into and from Pipeline Pilot data. On top of that, Pipeline Pilot protocols can also be configured to behave as ReST entrypoints. These protocols can then be called by external applications to process and produce JSON data packets. Many BIOVIA web applications use this method to submit requests in their javascript implementation.

The same type of interaction can be achieved from Workbook. Using a different set of wrapper classes, from Workbook libraries, you can interact with Pipeline Pilot protocols. This will allow your organization to reuse existing Pipeline Pilot protocols, and access additional resources in the same uniform way, through ReST entrypoints. Some data aggregation may be done in Workbook instead of Pipeline Pilot, with lighter data packets, more control on how data is manipulated in Workbook, better feedback to the end-user, and some performance improvements.

BIOVIA Workbook, Foundation-Hub, and Pipeline Pilot would work well for this type of interaction. They all use the same authentication framework, with a single token per user. Workbook can communicate to Foundation-Hub to get user information or instrument metadata. It could verified the data before passing it to Pipeline Pilot protocol. Pipeline Pilot protocol could process the data, build PDF report, add the report to Foundation-Hub, and provide a link to the report back to Workbook. All these interactions could be done with a common pattern using ReST entrypoints. Such implementation should be easy to maintain and extend. The ReST entrypoints should represent stateless webservices, thus reducing coupling between the different pieces integrated inside Workbook.

Conclusion

Electronic Laboratory Notebooks are key component of a digital laboratory environment that helps scientists execute faster, more informed, high-quality science. In this context, BIOVIA’s Workbook provides a highly adaptable and flexible solution that is configurable for use across multiple scientific disciplines. When deployed properly, Workbook can significantly improve data management, collaboration, IP protection, productivity and process efficiency across your organization.

BIOVIA’s Workbook capabilities can be significantly extended and enhanced when utilized with Pipeline Pilot – a graphical scientific authoring application that provides a comprehensive environment for the design, training, validation, and deployment of virtual models utilizing advanced analytics. The Pipeline Pilot platform supports a wide range of analytics capabilities, component collections, and domain-specific functionalities to support a full battery of scientific tasks for your organization.

To get the most out of your Workbook and Pipeline Pilot investments, it is important to work with a quality informatics consultant who understands the platform, your applications, and your scientific domain, and will work with you to complete the necessary business analysis and requirements gathering. Astrix has an experienced team of Workbook and Pipeline Pilot experts that can provide services for all your support needs including implementation, instrument and system integration, workflow and application authoring, custom reports, user training and more.

As the premier BIOVIA Services partner, Astrix provides increased value to customers through cost effective design, implementation and/or integration services leveraging BIOVIA applications and software. If you wish to learn more about Astrix services, or if you wish to discuss your overall laboratory informatics strategy with an Astrix expert, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

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Many organizations still track chemical inventory with basic paper notebooks or spreadsheets, or with difficult-to-use legacy systems that were developed in-house. Such systems do not effectively support accurate and up-to-date chemical inventory data, which can result in unnecessary duplicate ordering, excess purchasing (“safety” stock) to ensure necessary materials are on hand, high disposal costs, and disruption to your business when the necessary chemicals are not available.

Poor management of chemical inventory can in fact have a significant impact on operating costs. The reality is that every organization incurs costs for equipment, materials, labor, liability, safety training and compliance efforts at every stage in the chemical inventory management lifecycle. Beyond basic tracking of chemical inventory, there are literally hundreds of complicated inventory management processes that serve to optimize logistics and deployment, replenishment, disposition and forecasting.

Industry leading organizations are significantly reducing risk and costs by implementing chemical inventory management systems that allow for operational optimization. In this blog, we will discuss best practice recommendations for chemical inventory management and describe some of the features of the BIOVIA CISPro Chemical Inventory System that allow these recommendations to be put into practice.

Best Practices for Chemical Inventory Management

Best practices in chemical inventory management takes full advantage of the people, processes, and technology involved to drive operational excellence and risk mitigation. Some best practice recommendations for chemical inventory management include:

• Identify your inventory system components and optimize them
• Use your system to manage and mitigate the quantity of chemicals on-site
• Optimize chemical safety and inventory data
• Align with regulatory requirements from EPA and OSHA, as well as any state and local requirements
• Develop the ability to access current safety data sheet (SDS) information in real-time
• Identify and eliminate any chemical safety issues
• Enhance process efficiencies by streamlining lot tracking and qualification
• Automate regulatory reporting
• Automate audit trails
• Quantify inventory management costs
• Reduce inventory management cost

In order to align with these best practice recommendations, it is imperative for organizations to implement an integrated, centralized chemical inventory management system. A good chemical inventory management solution acts proactively to supplement lab processes instead of waiting for input. It will facilitate effective implementation of the best practices listed above and address other problem areas, allowing the organization to maintain accurate chemical inventory information in real-time and make the best use of all chemicals in all facilities.

Part of best practices for chemical inventory management is also facilitating adoption of the system. The reality is that getting scientists and other personnel interested in using a chemical inventory system is not necessarily easy. And even when this goal is accomplished, you must work to eliminate noncompliant usage.

A best practices solution should be easy to learn and use and training requirements should be minimal in order to ensure adoption. Towards this end, the project team implementing the system should configure and integrate the software with the user in mind: the process to pull items from inventory should not be complicated, key items should not be hidden, reports should be automated, triggers should be created to send an alert to the responsible person when inventory is low, the system should provide seamless integration with other systems in the organization, etc.

Corporate culture will need to evolve to accommodate the new system. Don’t expect the new system to conform to your existing workflows. With the implementation of a new system, new capabilities will be available, and workflows will change. Expect this and plan for effective change management.

BIOVIA CISPro Chemical Inventory System

The BIOVIA CISPro Chemical Inventory System is a comprehensive, web-based, best-in-class solution for multi-site tracking and managing laboratory supplies and chemicals over the full material lifecycle. By barcoding chemicals upon receipt, CISPro allows tracking of all the chemicals in your facility in real-time – you can track chemical receipt, sample verification and approval, lot release, threshold levels for compliance, re-labeling, requisitioning, dispensing, expiry, storage and container deletion.

CISPro also has features that support role-based user permissions and security, complete archiving and versioning, complete audit trails, remote inventory control, automated email notifications, report generation, quick access to hazard information in case of an emergency, and much more. Whether accessing the system from a mobile device or a computer, CISPro provides an intuitive and easy-to-use user interface with powerful features for editing, search & retrieval and reporting.

CISPro also offers a variety of integrations and modules:

• Integration with any laboratory informatics application of the BIOVIA Unified Lab Management offering like ELN, Compose and Capture etc.
• Integration with 3rd-party laboratory informatics solutions like ELN, LIMS or LES
• ACD for CISPro Module enables integrated searches of commercially available chemicals based on different search criteria including chemical structures
• Fire Code Reporting Module for hazardous materials reporting
• Regulatory Lists Module integrates with 3E’s Ariel regulatory compliance tools
• SDS Provider Module integrates with SiteHawk’s SDS Management Services
• Integration with Scitegrity for identification of controlled substances based on structure

By going beyond the minimal requirements for a chemical inventory system, CISPro allows company personnel to focus on managing the products and processes that drive your business instead of just managing the chemical inventory.

Benefits of an Integrated Best Practice Chemical Inventory Management System

As a lifecycle-oriented Chemical Inventory Management system, CISPro provides numerous benefits beyond those incurred by basic inventory management. Some of these include:

• Helps minimize the number and amount of chemicals stored
• Helps minimize waste generation and controls waste disposal costs
• Streamlines critical lab activities such as batch processing
• Facilitates budget preparation and planning by maintaining information on usage patterns, age, shelf-life and cost
• Provides quicker access to in-house materials through a shared inventory solution
• Allows regulatory compliance to be built into company workflows and business processes through integration of the system into overall IT infrastructure
• Simplifies the audit process by allowing automated report generation
• Enhances accessibility of safety data by making it available in a web browser with only a few clicks
• Facilitates user adoption with an intuitive and easy-to-use user interface that is consistent from site to site
• Enables integration with future technology innovation with open architecture
• Enables risk mitigation strategies for managing hazardous materials on-site
• Keeps management apprised of chemical inventory costs with timely reporting
• Reduces labor costs by increasing overall laboratory operational efficiency

Conclusion

While simply knowing which chemicals are in stock and where they are located can reduce regulatory scrutiny and address management concerns, a state-of-the-art chemical inventory management system like CISPro can significantly reduce costs and enhance operational efficiency and effectiveness.

One of the keys to getting the most from a good Chemical Inventory Management System is to implement the system with user adoption in mind. The project team should conduct a thorough Business Process Analysis in order to create a set of optimized system requirements that will guide the implementation. Depending on the number of sites involved and the integration requirements, an architectural assessment along with a roadmap to deployment may also be necessary in order to ensure a successful implementation that drives maximum business value for your organization.

Astrix has over 20 years of experience facilitating success in laboratory informatics implementations. As a BIOVIA partner, Astrix offers increased value to customers through specific design, implementation and/or integration services leveraging BIOVIA applications and software. We help enterprises build a scalable, integrated, and supported laboratory informatics application landscape.  BIOVIA’s leading infrastructure, coupled with the services expertise of Astrix, provides our customers with the foundation, they need to accelerate success both on-premise or in the cloud.

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