How can manufacturers bring the same digital transformation benefits enjoyed by other operational areas to the lab? How can the lab continuously improve and join the digital transformation? We offer five ways to get started.
Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full research, please visit our sponsor Dassault Systèmes BIOVIA (registration required).
Table of Contents
- The Value of an Integrated Lab Environment
- The Five Dimensions of Lab Integration
- People
- Process
- Software
- Hardware
- Data
- Next Steps
- Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chemical Labs are Overdue for Digital Transformation
Chemical labs are critical to every aspect of manufacturing, from R&D through scaleup to operations. While manufacturers have continuously improved product quality and manufacturing productivity through continuous improvement and digital transformation, the lab is often left out of these initiatives. That leaves lab managers with a patchwork of solutions and disjointed processes that burden scientists and technicians with non-value-added work. Poorly integrated lab environments take highly trained lab resources away from innovating and slow down product development, product launch, and product release.
It’s time to get the most out of the lab through continued digital transformation. We’ve identified five dimensions to measure and improve lab integration to optimize lab operations and enhance overall business performance. These dimensions include better integration between people, process, and technology in the lab, including integration of systems around a common data model. We’ll look at each of the dimensions in detail and discuss how taking a platform approach helps achieve them.
The Five Dimensions of Lab Integration
People, Process, and Technology
What does it take to integrate and drive better lab – and business – performance? We’ve identified five focus areas companies can measure and improve against using a continuous improvement approach. You can look at these “dimensions” across a typical, balanced view of people, process, and technology. This framework provides a proven foundation for developing and introducing more mature operations to drive better outcomes.
Any change effort must start with the people involved. For labs, it’s critical to get the most out of highly skilled scientists and technicians. They must be motivated, understand their contribution to the greater cause, and be enabled to collaborate to streamline work, data flows, and innovation. Operator data is also critical to creating a complete digital thread of scientific data.
This leads to process. Peoples’ activities must be standardized and optimized into efficient workflows and analytical methods that get the most out of people’s effort and create well-documented, trusted scientific data. Both physical and virtual processes, such as simulations, must be standardized and streamlined.
Segmenting the Technology Dimension
The third, fourth, and fifth areas relate to technology. Technology is too complex and too important to consider a single dimension. We’ll look at how integrating software, hardware, and data significantly improves lab productivity, throughput, and value.
Acknowledging Overlaps
Note that there are clear overlaps between these areas. For example, trusted test results rely on hardware readings but also validated analytical methods executed by people with the right permissions and certifications. Despite these inherent overlaps, we try to discuss each without too much overlap to give them the attention they deserve.
Next Steps
Recognize the Opportunity
Today’s lab environment is ripe for improvement. Most chemical labs’ productivity hasn’t continuously improved on par with other operations in the manufacturing enterprise. There is still too much inefficiency, inability to find and reuse data, and patchworks of solutions. Lack of integration leads to inefficiency, delays, and a lack of agility in the status quo. It’s time to digitally transform and integrate the lab across people, process, and technology using a platform approach to speed up the lab and resulting product development, launch, and release.
Get Started
Ultimately, companies should integrate from ideation to production in the plant, creating a data continuum or digital thread with effective data governance across the product lifecycle. Most companies should start small. It’s essential that they understand their starting point by objectively evaluating their capabilities and identifying what must be improved. But, they shouldn’t expect to change everything at once and they don’t have to reinvent the wheel; they can reuse existing methods and processes already developed. Further, they can extend these with simple, out-of-the-box methods.
Plan for Success
Lab managers have to look at increasing integration across people, process, and technology programmatically with an emphasis on data. It’s critical to get management support for their effort and communicate the value in business terms. They must also make sure the lab is involved, sees the advantage for them, and feels empowered to make needed changes. It’s important to recognize that this is a journey. Effectively updating people, process, and technology takes time. It’s OK to start small but have a plan that leads to fully digital, integrated people, processes, and technology to drive speed and accuracy. But it’s time to get started.
*This summary is an abbreviated version of the research and does not contain the full content. For the full research, please visit our sponsor Dassault Systèmes BIOVIA (registration required).
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