E-WorkBook Inventory

E-WorkBook Inventory Enables Researchers to Focus on Innovation

E-WorkBook Inventory extends The E-WorkBook Cloud platform in a way that provides organizations more options for executing and reviewing laboratory work. Effective stock control, location management and recording the status of equipment i.e. calibration records, prevents busy scientists from costly delays caused by inadequate supplies or equipment. The intuitive web interface means the system can be used across different locations, and it integrates with barcode scanners and label printing technology such as or Zebra™ or Bartender™ (cloud customers only).

Items in E-WorkBook Inventory can be directly accessed and updated during the course of an experiment. Dynamically managing inventory from an experimental workflow provides immediate value, as researchers can easily decrement quantities of reagents and check to see if the equipment is within calibration.

Effortless compliance reporting

Integration with E-WorkBook makes compliance reporting effortless, as a full audit trail of inventory items is accessible directly from the ELN (Electronic Laboratory Notebook) record, capturing the status of the item when it was actually used. Tracking the item’s point-of-use within the experiment workflow provides a rich contextual record of information to support quality management, enabling researchers to quickly identify sources of error, or provide a list of billable materials for contracted work.

Leveraging E-WorkBook Inventory enables you to simplify your laboratory workflow and sample management processes, giving improvements in turnaround time and improving the quality of data capture. The full auditing capabilities (including a GXP mode) maintains comprehensive traceability of inventory usage to reinforce compliance.

Simple data input

Efficient inventory management relies on having quality data. With a streamlined user interface, individual items, or batches of items can be easily registered and edited. E-WorkBook Inventory also supports the use of external identifiers, provided by a supplier. In-line validation of key properties helps to highlight any issues with the metadata to improve data quality and integrity and reduce wastage or misuse. As part of the registration workflow, users can also define generic stores options to an item e.g. to register both samples and a freezer box received as part of a shipment, and to print labels for the newly created items. Where required, E-WorkBook Inventory also provides a duplicate resolution workflow, to match new items against existing known inventory.

Advanced location management

The advanced location management features allow for the hierarchical relationship between locations, containers and inventory items. By supporting the concept of structured box management, E-WorkBook Inventory ensures the user can quickly identify available locations for a new sample.

Inventory items can be quickly identified using a simple type-ahead query, with dynamic filtering to of the location hierarchy. The system supports a granular security model to restrict edit permissions of equipment, materials, and samples, helping to improve compliance by preventing unauthorized or unintentional changes to records. Sample quantity tracking is supported, and the system distinguishes between unopened bottles and those that are already in use. Quantities can be directly updated through the E-WorkBook Inventory interface, or automatically decremented as part of the experiment workflow.

As raw materials are transformed into valued samples, the user can derive genealogical relationships between records, items and locations. This provides a clear path to understanding how samples were generated, e.g. as part of a splitting or pooling operation of samples.

Example workflows supported by E-WorkBook Inventory

• To create a buffer, a user would need to identify reagents, determine if they were in stock, and also to check if the balance and pH meter were within calibration. Once created, the buffer would be given an expiry date and stored in a defined location for later use.
• A researcher receives a shipment of 50 samples in a box. Using the integrated interface, the user can register the samples and simultaneously create and register a new freezer box, providing immediate efficiency gains.
• An experiment did not produce the expected outcome, and it was thought that a buffer at the incorrect pH was used. Immediately in the experiment, the researcher can see that the pH meter used in the preparation of the buffer was out of calibration.