Data informatics by SmartScience
Innovating how data technologies are applied for real-time purchasing, inventory and workflow insights, enabling the digital lab and how scientists advance collaboration.
Avantor’s Guide to Deploying Internet of Things Solutions
Lab of the Future at the Bridgewater Innovation Center video
Advancing the digital lab is a needed opportunity to reinvent the lab ecosystem. Data informatics is a key element in this transformation, and powers the SmartScience approach to developing how data are gathered and their insights applied to accelerate science. Leveraging Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), Avantor Insights and Key Performance Indicator (KPI) inventory optimization, along with the possibilities of augmented reality and voice-assisted technologies, SmartScience advances data’s role in supporting the digital lab of the future.
DATA-ENABLED SCIENCE
What labs look like today hasn’t significantly changed over the last 100 years. Yet, science is answering the demand for accelerated breakthrough on a continuous, if not daily, basis. At the forefront of science’s journey of reinvention stands a single contributing factor.
Data informatics has emerged as a clear differentiator in how labs gain critical insights to optimize processes, control cost and produce results. Embedded with Avantor’s heritage of supporting innovation, SmartScience digital technologies provide easy access to real-time data, enabling ways scientists collaborate on important research work, opening pathways to global scientific talent, and accelerating time-to-market for life-saving therapies.
Here’s how:
Internet of Things (IoT)
IoT solutions leverage physical technologies embedded with smart sensors that detect and alert of changes in inventory, including chemical inventory and materials use, and exchange this data with other devices and systems across the lab’s enterprise over the internet, such as:
RFID scanners, hand-held smart devices that allow lab personnel to “wand” over inventory placed on a shelf or other storage location. Insights including inventory levels and container-level tracking required in chemical management are generated in real-time and integrate with Inventory Manager and Chemical Manager reporting software.
Benefit: Lab managers can pinpoint exactly where chemical inventory is located within the lab’s ecosystem, fulfilling strict regulatory tracking and reporting requirements.
Smart shelves contain digital sensors that detect inventory changes down to the piece-level, automate replenishment aligned to pre-set guardrails and send real-time reporting to Inventory Manager software.
Benefit: Lab personnel remain informed and in control of inventory and consumables management.
Smart button technology alerts lab personnel when on-demand laboratory services are needed at the bench, such as glass washing or medical waste removal.
Benefit: Scientists working at the bench can remain focused on research, while lab support personnel receive real-time notifications to complete specific tasks.
Deep lens camera technology assesses and provides visual confirmation that lab personnel adhere to pre-set personal protection equipment (PPE) protocols prior to entering critical environments such as clean rooms; visually assesses and confirms inventory levels.
Benefit: Ensure stability of critical environments used in production of ultra-high purity materials and products, documentation of personal protection equipment (PPE) protocol compliance and AI-assisted inventory monitoring and management.
Watch this video to see these SmartScience technologies at work in our Bridgewater Innovation Center, one of our 11 Innovation Centers globally.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)
AI and ML generate predictive data to provide faster and easier purchasing of lab product and service needs. Complementing IoT technologies that gather data to assess and optimize current state, AI and ML technologies advance how this same data is analyzed to serve future state lab needs, such as predicting the needs of scheduled experiments within specific workflows.
Here’s how:
Technologies support how scientists already work through an open and adaptive digital ecosystem accessing and sharing data with any electronic lab notebook (ELN), so real-time product and service use is converted into data informing future use needs.
Experiment readiness resulting from purchasing, procurement and inventory processes working together seamlessly, so scientists have exactly what they need, when they need it, at the bench.
Cost containment and visibility through automated, data-based purchasing, eliminating last minute stock-outs affecting lab productivity as well as over-purchasing creating unnecessary spend and waste.
Avantor Insights
SmartScience digital technologies further leverage data to enable Avantor Insights, an innovative product recommendations engine available on Avantor’s e-commerce platform.
Avantor Insights analyzes customer purchasing history and product search inquiries to provide personalized recommendations, displaying alternative items available from multiple suppliers matching the current search item’s specifications.
These customized purchasing experiences empower customers to cross-compare products while saving on costs, all within an expanded supply chain driven by customer preferences.
Avantor Insights, embedded with Avantor Business System (ABS) methodologies rooted in continuous improvement, advances optimized inventories so product is received, stocked and ready for use as expected – moving science forward, faster.
Key Performance Indicator (KPI) insights
KPI insights provide customers with extensive inventory spend and use data across the entire enterprise, including robust global and site-level metrics customized into month-to-date and year-to-date reporting. SmartScience leverages the 360-degree product and materials optimization provided by Inventory Manager software, to create a comprehensive view of inventory use and performance, based on product and point-of-use (POU) metrics:
Additional global metrics inform on Environmental, Health and Safety (EH&S) compliance and results, service quality, service savings and resource productivity, accessible through a user-friendly digital dashboard reporting at organizational, region and site level.
Learn how to drive sustainable discovery with lab digitalization
By Tola Olorunnisola, VP Innovation, Marketing & Digital