5 Ways Albert Differs from LIMS & Other Lab Systems

Zack Kisner shares his insights! As a co-founder at Albert and Head of Product and Design, Zack drives Albert’s design and functionality to meet the needs of the chemical and materials science industries. Zack is a trained mechanical engineer with a background in 3D printing and technology consulting.

We often get asked how we differ from other Lab systems–such as LIMS, ELNs, and CIMS tools–to name a few. When we do side-by-side comparisons of those types of tools and Albert’s end-to-end R&D platform, it’s easy to identify the key differences when it comes to functionality. Overall, there are key components that permeate throughout our solution that uniquely enable Albert’s customers to accelerate innovation and achieve better results. If you’re interested in a side-by-side comparison of functionality with the systems you’re currently using, reach out and let’s schedule a call!  In the meantime, here is a quick overview of how Albert overall differs from other lab systems.

1. End-to-end R&D platform

Traditional ELNs, LIMS, and CIMS solutions focus on specific aspects of laboratory management, such as data management or sample tracking. Whereas Albert is an end-to-end R&D platform that integrates all the important components of these systems into a single system—providing a more comprehensive approach for managing the entire research process. This end-to-end approach is a key distinction in terms of why Albert is successful in helping our customers innovate faster.

The importance of a single, unified system is how we’ve elevated the game when it comes to lab systems, as this distinction drives the success of the other key differences outlined below!

2. Data-Driven Insights

With Albert, you get a single source of truth for your lab. As all datapoints collected in the lab feed into Albert’s single, unified system, fueling data-driven decisions and enabling smarter experimentation.

Key to the success of data-driven decisions, and what makes Albert different, is our focus on delivering Albert Insights throughout the entire platform, and in every step of the R&D process. Albert Insights include:

• Materials and Standards database: 50,000+ commercially available chemicals and 300,000+ CAS Numbers, ASTM standard and more provide the information you need to stay EHS compliant, instantly at your fingertips (plus we’re adding to our database daily!).
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML): Predictive technology pulled from an ever-growing repository of data, accelerating the entire R&D process.
• Experimental Simulation: Automatically see the results of experiment variations, so you can spend less time testing and more time innovating.

For example, Albert Insights delivers data from past experiments to make predictions about the outcomes of new experiments, helping reduce the time and resources needed to conduct research. Innovators are provided with an understanding of the safety and cost profiles of potential formulations before they even approach the bench—no more wasted time on products that do not meet safety regulations or are too expensive to implement. By simulating outcomes, raw materials are not used until the researcher develops a formulation with a higher likelihood of success.

The combination of Albert continuously augmenting the database and organizations using the system enables data-driven insights to become even more powerful over time.

3. Collaboration

Albert is designed to support collaboration at scale, which is another key component of the success of Albert’s customers. Our system enables scientists to easily share data and collaborate with colleagues within their lab or around the world, helping speed up the research process and increase productivity.

With access to your organization’s historical data and the ability to easily collaborate with colleagues, you can eliminate time wasted looking for answers that may already exist. For instance, a customer of Albert was able to rapidly bring a product to market by leveraging previous project knowledge within their organization.

The product, 3D-printed nasal swabs for COVID-19 testing, was produced in record time. With the help of Albert, the customer facilitated collaboration between two of their locations halfway around the world from each other. On top of that, the number of tests needed to be run was greatly reduced thanks to the historical data extracted from previous projects within the organization. In this scenario, innovators avoided days–or even weeks–of wasted time experimenting.

A key consideration for sharing data that is built into Albert is security and control functionality–ensuring that proprietary information is not being shared. As part of our highly secure, API-forward cloud platform, there are robust access management controls that enable information to be shared with colleagues while keeping key data, such as formulations, proprietary. Our tool also provides a useful audit trail when needed.

4. Automation

Another key differentiator with the Albert end-to-end R&D platform is our focus on automation to expedite lab work and remove inefficiencies. This includes tedious and time-consuming activities such as assigning experiment tasks to lab technicians, researching and finding the ideal chemicals to run experiments, managing inventory, and more. Not only does Albert help accelerate these processes, our end-to-end R&D platform mitigates human errors that typically occur when manually compiling and sharing data.

A great example of how Albert automates a tedious process in the lab is Albert’s safety data sheet automation. With Albert, our customers can rapidly generate a label that contains all the safety information for each geographic area, without needing to be double—or triple—checked by a compliance partner–which often leads to needless delays (days if not weeks) in getting samples to customers.

The automation functionality throughout the Albert system maps directly to the lab process and enables scientists to focus on their core competencies so they can work more efficiently and effectively. It’s because of our automation that Albert is often called a digital lab assistant by our customers!

5. User-friendly

As with any comprehensive system, if the “user” is not comfortable using it, the system will not have a positive impact on the operations, and if anything, it becomes a cost center vs. delivering true ROI.

Engagement and usage are key to the success of Albert, and that’s why we’re laser focused on ensuring our end-to-end R&D platform is, quite simply, easy to use. Because Albert was developed by hands-on experts in the chemical industry, it is designed around the way scientists and technicians naturally work.

With Albert, scientists are able to quickly get started and easily access the tools and data resources needed to support their research, streamlining the R&D process from beginning to end.

“Wow, we’re so used to having to do a lot of this manually, including adding duplicate data into two systems, what are we going to do with all of our free time?!”

Albert customer’s comment to our Customer Success team during onboarding session

When we first decided to build Albert six plus years ago, we were determined to find a better way to manage experiments and get the tools and data insights needed to be successful. As a result, our focus from the onset has been to build a better, more comprehensive solution to help our industry facilitate faster and better results in the lab.

We are very proud of Albert and our key differentiators relative to the myriad of lab tools out there. Differentiators that provide real-world results to our chemistry and materials science industry.