Boosting productivity within labs With automation. Boosting productivity within labs With automation.
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Boosting productivity within labs With automation.

Pharma Tech Outlook | Monday, July 04, 2022

Enhanced productivity is one of the main benefits of using automation software within a lab.

Fremont, CA: Specific technologies and software solutions can help you work more efficiently by offering multidisciplinary research, development, and optimization strategy, allowing you to do more in the same amount of time. By decreasing the need for human interaction for tedious tasks, more time is possible to scientists to be more inventive and creative within their core roles.

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Lab automation in action

Lab automation is pretty broad, but whether you are doing high-throughput screening, robotic clinical and analytical testing, diagnostics, large-scale research (or any other lab-connected activities), automating your chemistry will save you time.

Lubrizol, a speciality chemicals company that produces a range of additives and advanced materials has experienced the benefits of lab automation firsthand, which has significantly impacted their productivity.

Emma Playfoot, a scientist at the company, clarified that before implementing lab control software, they had difficulty monitoring exotherms during their reactions through standard thermocouples. This time-consuming, manual process meant physically watching for a temperature rise.

Improved efficiency and productivity

There'sUndoubtedly, lab automation can provide a huge productivity boost by eliminating the more menial, tedious tasks that take up the most time. By implementing software that enables lab automation, an operator needs to make adjustments to the experiment during a reaction manually is removed, and data is gathered simultaneously with much more accuracy.

Many automated products also enable dynamic changes to temperature based on feedback from the reaction, which is a great advantage if the response is too long for a typical working day or there are planning meetings that would have otherwise disturbed the reaction.

This innovation enables reactions to run overnight rather than pause them and restart them the next day. It implies deviating from any potential manufacturing processes or giving imprecise results.

It can be time-taking and mentally taxing for a single person to manage multiple devices manually. The rise of automation within labs can aid overcome many of the challenges this presents.

Better use of data and improved results

Including increasing the accuracy of experiments, lab automation can also assist in recording experimental data and producing reports which simplify post-reaction analysis. This is a massive benefit because capturing data can be a time-consuming, manual process often prone to errors.

For instance, lab software can track reaction exotherms and automatically record the temperature changes, which can then be displayed in a graph showing how the temperature diverges over time.

This provides a massive benefit when speaking to manufacturers about reaction profiles, as the appropriate data can be pulled directly from the software in a readily accessible format, making it easier to explain the different reaction steps.

Automating your data capture and having it provided in a digestible format, for example, a graph makes it easier to interpret. It also makes it simple to spot trends and identify anomalies you might have missed during the reaction, enabling chemists to glean insights that could help improve manufacturing processes.

Improved safety

By allowing scientists to control their lab work better, they can make their processes safer. Chemical processes' scale-up comes with inherent risks, particularly in controlling exotherms.

Automation can give an increased level of safety as specific software will permit you to program the dosing; thus, it stops adding a reagent or ends the reaction if the reaction temperature reaches a particular value. This decreases the risk of exothermic runaways, even if the response is left unattended.

The future of automation

With so many advances happening rapidly, it's understandable to assume that everything will change immediately.

Automation comes with numerous bumps in the road, and it will take a while for all of the problems to be ironed out completely — so don't expect things to change overnight. But the big news is that, different from many other professions, research shows only a 26% probability of automation 'stealing jobs' amongst chemical scientists (despite a fair share of fear-mongering going on).

It's much more about clearing the need for humans to do the more boring, tedious tasks rather than eliminating their jobs. A beneficial assistant, if you will!

Whatever the future contains, automation will be a part of it anyway, shape, or form, so we should be seen to embrace it and the myriad of changes that come along with it.

Here's a review of the main advantages you can get from performing automation systems and software in your lab processes:

- better productivity and efficiency

- more reproducibility

- enhanced collaboration

- fewer errors

- improved safety.

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