Enzyme experts at EUCODIS excel with eLabJournal

We have benefited a great deal from having all the information in one place, providing the whole team with comprehensive (anytime, anywhere) access to the data. This allows us to keep all the lab personnel informed about ongoing experiments and use the workforce flexibly where it is needed. This makes us more efficient and helps us to compile formal reports about our projects with minimal effort.

Dr. Jan Modregger, MBA, Head of Research & Development, Production

EUCODIS Bioscience

EUCODIS Bioscience, founded in 2007 in Vienna, Austria, develops and manufactures enzyme products for applications in the pharma, biotech, fine chemicals, food & feed, and cosmetics industries, and manufactures an expanding portfolio for over 50 enzyme products.

In addition, EUCODIS provides contract services for the production of recombinant proteins and enzymes by covering the whole spectrum of bioprocess development up to industrial manufacturing of the target proteins.

Goal

EUCODIS develops and produces its own enzyme portfolio for pharma, cosmetics, diagnostics, and other applications, and provides services in the area of custom enzyme development and production. Following its growth strategy, we want to take green chemistry and biocatalysis to the next level and make our future more sustainable and environmentally friendly.

Challenge

Raise productivity to break through capacity limits, increase revenue and grow company value

Developing custom enzyme solutions requires a lot of experimental work, and documenting that takes a lot of time. We analyzed our workflow and found that the capacity of our facility
and the team could be optimized. The only way to increase capacity over the short run was to become much more productive by introducing Laboratory Information System (LIMS) to manage and organize experiments and document them.

Documentation must support our own quality management processes to meet ISO9001 requirements and meet the needs of our customers, patent offices, and other authorities. Old-fashioned documentation in paper laboratory notebooks had become more and more limiting. In addition, modern laboratory equipment generates the results in electronic form, which leads to unnecessary printing of results and archiving in paper form. And past information was almost impossible to find on paper, limiting its utility. The development of novel enzymes involves many different methods, so our biggest challenge was to find a very flexible soſtwaresolution that could also organize and standardize our routine work in development and production.

Solution

No choice but to go digital-and the way to go was eLabJournal

We needed to choose a LIMS and get up and running! Some other institutes and companies on the Vienna Biocenter campus had started their transition to digital one or two years earlier, so we could benefit from their experience. eLabJournal was among their recommendations. It offered the best combination of features for us and almost seemed tailored to the particular workflow in our labs, but its overall usability tipped the scales toward eLabJournal. It does not help if your LIMS offers all kinds of features when its usability does not match the users’ needs. We used the offered trial period to document a couple of projects “all-digital”, so everyone could get familiar with it.

One major goal was to reduce the effort needed for documenting projects in which multiple coworkers were involved. Before eLabJournal, a paper lab notebook was handed between them. They could collaborate easily but working together on documentation had remained difficult, so we looked specifically for a tool to make collaboration on documentation easy, effective, and efficient. eLabJournal allows this by defining group members, inviting them to different projects, and generally providing a finely tuned system to assign permissions to various projects. So far, we have mainly used the standard functions to document our experiments and have just started to migrate our templates from our QM system into eLabJournal. Still, the template functionality will definitely be used extensively in the future.

Result

eLabJournal Proves Effective, Easy, and Affordable

We have found that eLabJournal offers a smooth way of planning and organizing experiments and results for a flexible team with changing tasks. So, it not only solves the problem of avoiding paper laboratory notebooks but helps to collaborate flexibly since all involved persons can follow the experiments online, comment on them, and add information. A significant benefit for everyone is the possibility to search for specific information, which is very impractical and time-consuming; electronic templates allow us to standardize methods in the lab much more easily and track the results.

Although our work requires a lot of flexibility because assays and experiments in the research and development of novel enzymes vary a lot from project to project, we have benefited a great deal from having all the information in one place, providing the whole team with comprehensive (anytime, anywhere) access to the data. This allows us to keep all the lab personnel informed about ongoing experiments and use the workforce flexibly where needed. This makes us more efficient and helps to compile formal reports about our project with minimal effort. Although it took some effort to get started, once we had completed the transition to an all-digital way of planning and documenting our lab work, we noticed that it helped to increase not only the personal productivity of an individual user but of the whole team. Sharing information by making it accessible to all involved team members helped us to spend more time on the research itself than on documentation or searching for information. And for a small and flexible company like EUCODIS, this helped tremendously to save time for the whole team, so we all became more productive in the lab. It took a while to get into all the “tricks” eLabJournal can do, and even after half a year, we still discover features we have not used before. So the transition to all-digital is still going on.

In our business, our customers value speed, cost efficiency, and quality, and eLabJournal has proved to be a very valuable tool to improve our performance and achieve our goals.

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