Every laboratory is different, but some challenges are the same across all labs. The most common ones are:

• Boosting productivity & efficiency with limited resources
• Slashing the costs of lab operations and motion waste
• Improving traceability and thus results quality
• Handling/storing chemicals safely
• Staying in compliance

Covid-19 has posed additional challenges:

• Accelerating digital transformation
• Futureproofing lab processes
• Facilitating remote work & ensuring access to the lab for planning

Our personal lives are now thoroughly digitalized, but the lab is a different story. Manual data capture makes transcription errors inevitable, posing quality risks. Handling chemicals poses additional quality/safety risks and is time consuming. Disposing of unused, expired chemicals is costly. And real-time access to materials data from anywhere is lacking.

A recent survey on current inventory management practices shows that:

• 85% of respondents still manage their inventories with paper and Excel.
• 70% manually review these records for expired consumables in root cause analysis.
• 25% of respondents’ work time is spent managing these data.
• 52% throw out ~15% of their total stock due to expiration, at an average monthly cost of >$7,000.

Labs have several materials workflows. One of them is the material lifecycle workflow, which focuses on adding materials to inventory:

1. When reordered supplies arrive, you register them, checking the shipment for accuracy and documenting data such as batch numbers. If SDSs came with the materials, you document them too; if not, you download them from the supplier’s website and put them in a shared folder.
2. You store the items, handling them safely to reduce the risk of incidents and checking the SDSs so you don’t store the wrong chemicals together.
3. When planning for and then executing experiments, you look up the correct items, find them, take them from their cabinets, use them, document their data (e.g., batch numbers) during use and then put them away correctly. All relevant documents in their various locations must be updated.
4. Once materials are used up, you reorder them, but since you don’t have a complete lab inventory overview, someone must let you know they’re out of stock. Then you reorder those items on your company’s ERP, e-commerce or B2B platform.

What if we could...

• Create inventory efficiencies by minimizing time spent on admin?
• Improve data traceability by digitally ensuring materials/data integrity?
• Digitize paper trails by harmonizing user access to real-time information?

We could indeed, using the LANEXO Laboratory Inventory, Safety and Compliance Management System.

This 21 CFR Part 11–compliant solution has been designed to create efficiencies, improve safety and facilitate compliance in regulated labs. The LANEXO System is a vendor-neutral solution for complete lab coverage: it manages all your consumables, not just those from Sigma-Aldrich. It includes:

• An Android app for digital data capture at point of use.
• RFID labels for tracking consumables and their storage locations.
• A Web app for all user permissions, user group, inventory export and audit trail settings.
• User access cards to give each user a unique digital signature, which is captured in the audit trail. The audit trail holds all information on what any one user has done with a consumable, capturing every change. You can export and forward it to regulatory authorities if needed.

LANEXO System RFID labels are designed for lab use. Just put a Smart Label on a bottle and scan it using the LANEXO Mobile App on a smartphone. All information about that chemical—its volume, who last used it and much more—is captured digitally. No more transcription errors, which increases data traceability and integrity.

With conventional methods, it takes ~100 hours a year to manage your inventory. With the LANEXO System, it takes only ~3 hours: a 97% reduction. The time needed to plan, execute and document an experiment with conventional methods is ~50 minutes. The LANEXO System cuts this to 4 minutes, a 92% reduction.

As a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service solution, the LANEXO System offers easy implementation/integration into your existing workflow, as well as remote access to data from anywhere. And the LANEXO Mobile App is as simple to use as any app on your personal phone.

In short, the LANEXO System can help you:

• Boost lab productivity/efficiency by cutting time spent on inventory tasks by 97%.
• Reduce sunken costs and motion waste by giving all authorized users a digital overview of stock.
• Speed digital transformation in your lab by reducing the burden of user adoption.
• Improve quality, safety & compliance processes with digital data traceability.
• Meet regulatory-authority demands and be audit ready, avoiding the financial risks of noncompliance.
• Futureproof your processes with a digital tool.
• Access materials data remotely for experimental prep and pre-prep.

Reach out to us with any questions at lanexo@merckgroup.com or  www.lanexosystem.com