“Good, cheap and fast. Pick two.”
– Manufacturing idiom.
The above quote is included to remind us all that there are no perfect solutions and in purchasing lab automation equipment we are balancing price, throughput, flexibility, scalability, durability, and a host of other factors. That being said here are some simple steps we recommend you go through to get started down the right path to purchasing lab automation equipment in a new lab or replacing automation in your existing processes.
Step 1. Make a flow chart of your current lab operation and/or automation.
This might feel like overkill and a good vendor may put this together for you, but breaking out Visio or PowerPoint to make a flow chart is time well spent and will make the rest of the lab automation selection process much less painful. Putting pen to paper and creating a flow chart will ensure all steps to process a sample are accounted for and allow/force vendors to present solutions that eliminate and / or automate specific steps. Read More
As a lab operation grows, so does the need to have unique identifiers (UID) for each sample to track its processing and associate particular biological / chemical properties and analytical results. Often, the first step in implementing a new process or adopting a laboratory information management system (LIMS) is choosing a unique identifier, specifically the length and format.