Different ways Benchling can increase lab productivity

You’ve got deadlines approaching, IND applications to submit, and milestones to achieve. Whether you are a biopharmaceutical company developing breakthrough gene therapies or an Agbio lab cultivating the fruits of tomorrow, boosting lab productivity is a constant pressure. Fortunately, Benchling—the industry’s leading life sciences cloud—can meaningfully improve lab efficiency across a variety of industries. With Benchling, labs can track, measure, and forecast their mission critical processes and accelerate their overall time to milestone.

Here are four ways Benchling can increase productivity in your lab.

1. Optimize processes across the lab

Experiments, workflows, and protocols—they are rarely perfect the first time. To increase lab productivity and consistently get reliable results and products, teams need to be able to eliminate bottlenecks and standardize common tasks. Ideally, they will be able to do this as quickly as possible. However, company growth naturally exposes barriers to optimization. In our experience, many of these barriers can be attributed to clunky software that makes it difficult for teams to comprehensively track R&D progress, efficiently iterate their processes, and learn from everyone’s experiments.

Without the ability to track samples through the entire experiment and development lifecycles, scientists can’t build a complete understanding of what’s working and what’s not. How can you optimize a process to boost productivity if you don’t have the tools to help you identify areas of improvement?

Benchling not only gives teams a full view of their workflow, but also makes it easy to test new conditions, standardize processes, compare results across multiple runs of the same workflow, and coordinate tasks and resource utilization across teams.

Here are a few ways you can optimize laboratory processes with Benchling:

• Complete Traceability:Design and visualize R&D workflows with trackable stages to get a 360-degree view of R&D progress in the Workflowsapplication

• Confident Decision Making: Easily standardize and access protocols and results in Notebookto ensure reproducibility and make decisions rapidly yet confidently

• Rapid Iteration:Quickly apply learnings and iterate on processes without having to write a line of code

• Robust Analytics: Evaluate the impact of process iterations on your product by building dashboards, tracking metrics, and analyzing results with Insights

2. Streamline team-wide communication and collaboration

Establishing continuity between scientists working on different aspects of a shared project, such as between wet lab and informatics teams or between research and development teams, is key for increasing lab productivity. However, scientists often end up using different terminology to describe the same processes and storing their data in siloed locations, which slows data integration and knowledge transfer.

Benchling serves as a single source of truth for your entire team and makes it easier and faster to find and share results.

Here’s how:

• Full Connectivity & Permissions Settings:With a fully integrated data management software solution, teams can share progress and results with global teams and leadership, while setting data permissions to ensure that they are only sharing the data that they intend to.

• Consistent Vocabulary:Benchling enforces a controlled vocabulary to ensure global searchability and a cohesive understanding across teams.

• Comprehensive Sample Tracking:Each sample gets a unique identifier that allows scientists to track all replicates and downstream samples across different experiments.

• Customizable Dashboards:With Benchling Insights, scientists can easily curate, save, and share dashboards to provide a full view of scientific and operational metrics related to particular experiments, programs, and teams.

Even if R&D teams are globally distributed, Benchling offers an easy way to share progress and results. Everyone can easily access data and results shared in team meetings, since scientists can present directly from the software; and team members in downstream groups can easily access a complete history of everything that happened upstream of them.

Because each piece of data gets immediately connected to all of its associated data, such as sequences and corresponding samples, you effectively erase the occurrence of dead-end searches and tedious data cleaning. This way, all of your data is readily visible and interlinked, even if it was generated by different scientists working months apart. And while we all hate to see valuable team members go, even if a scientist transitions out of the company, there is virtually no knowledge loss because data is stored in the cloud rather than on personal hard drives, machines, or paper notebooks.

Learn how TurtleTree Labs uses Benchling to collaborate across international sites and rapidly scale clean milk production.

Read the Case Study

3. Unlock insights and make discoveries faster

As labs scale up, adopt new instruments, and launch new projects, large amounts of valuable data get left on individual computers, physical notebooks, and hard drives. This results in sifting through mass amounts of data, which is time-consuming and slows the pace of discovery. Teams can increase lab productivity by generating mission-critical insights as early as possible, but this requires standardized data capture that is accessible in a single source of truth.

When all of your data is centralized in the cloud-based data warehouse within Benchling, you can design and implement a custom data structure, effortlessly query and analyze your data, and visualize results exactly the way you want.

With the full history of experiments and results at your fingertips, you can make prompt, data-driven decisions to help design your next set of experiments, set new goals and timelines, and bring your biotech product to market as quickly as possible.

With Benchling Insights, teams can unlock:

• Operational Insights:Dive deeper into resource allocations, processes, and usage to enhance program management, gauge team productivity, and optimize workflows.

• Scientific Insights:Analyze your data to understand and compare results within, or across, experiments. Leverage these insights to make more informed decisions critical to your R&D pipeline.

• Administrative Insights:Get a real-time understanding of how your scientists use Benchling.

Benchling users are more confident in data quality and completeness, fueling decision-making insights and breakthrough discoveries.

Here are some ways clients are already using Benchling to generate insights faster:

Inzen: Scientists are connecting the dots between Thanokines™, omics data, and functional assay data by establishing clear data linkages across teams. Read More.

Pairwise: Department heads are using real-time reporting in customized dashboards to drive informed decisions about which plants to keep and quickly pull out trend-forecasting insights. Read More.

Jounce Therapeutics: The company migrated 10,000s of unique biologics and 100,000s of containers into Benchling to eliminate the need of transferring data and files across multiple software platforms, minimize software maintenance, and simplify report generation. Read More.

4. Automate your lab

Automation provides a clear path to increase productivity in the lab because it minimizes the number of manual and tedious tasks scientists have to perform, ultimately giving lab members the gift of time to focus on the most intellectually challenging activities.

This is critically important in modern labs where experiments, processes, and workflows are increasingly complex, require more steps, and generate larger datasets. Automation not only improves  lab productivity by relieving team members of infamously monotonous tasks (e.g., data entry, inventory updates, experiment tracking, etc.), but also by standardizing processes. This bolsters reproducibility, reduces failures, and enables forecasting to keep things moving forward without delay.

How Benchling can help drive lab productivity through automation:

• Interlinked Data:Benchling’s Notebookand Registrycan automatically link experiments to samples and other notebook entries for quick and easy navigation and organization.

• A Platform Solution: Adopt all six of Benchling’s fully integrated applications, including Workflowsand Insights, to push automation to the next level—where all data capture, tracking, organization, and initial analysis is fully automated.

• Integration and Automation:Benchling’s Rest API and custom integrationcapabilities help tie everything together, so labs can use Benchling as a hub to integrate with other technologies and create a data pipeline. For instance, with Benchling for Lab Automationsubmit data directly to automated robotics platforms and automatically direct data back to Benchling.

Learn how Beam Therapeutics works with Benchling to leverage robotics automation to accelerate gene therapy discovery

Read the Case Study

Increase lab productivity with Benchling

Benchling’s unified cloud-based informatics platform helps 600+ companies to accelerate R&D and increase lab productivity. Through a suite of interconnected applications, Benchling supports everything from flexible early research to rigorous development, as well as full, comprehensive tracking of all experiments and workflows in between. In short, the system provides a 360-degree view of both R&D processes and operations to drive better productivity, collaboration, and efficiency, allowing scientists to focus on what they do best.