It’s clear that the impact automation has made to the manufacturing industry has yet to be realised in the lab space.
The problem is, many of the labs who have adopted automation are not making the most of it. They are still working in batch processes with a method built from the bench and scaled up, rather than using workflows that are properly optimised for their bottlenecks or for the flow of materials through their system.
As a result, even with automated lab equipment in place, people with PhDs, at the forefront of their respective fields, are spending their days moving microplates and struggling to scale their experiments to achieve the world-changing results they should be getting from automation.
The manufacturing industry has long used automation to parallelise their workflows, allowing processes such as formulation, blending, packing and cleaning take place simultaneously, increasing efficiency.
If labs are able to take these lessons from manufacturing, they can utilise automation not only to improve the quality of results, but also to improve efficiency and better utilise staff by removing repetitive processes.