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How a Customer Leveraged Albert to Support the Battle Against COVID-19

“I’ve been working in research and development teams for almost 20 years–and Albert is something that’s really game changing. My day-to-day working environment has been transformed, and there’s still huge potential for Albert to make our processes even leaner, faster and more collaborative.”

Impact of Our Customer’s Digital Colleague

A lab manager at a multinational chemical manufacturing company has a colleague who lives in a cloud. He’s smart, easy to work with, and never sleeps. Ever. He works 24 hours a day in research labs around the world and recently turbo-charged the development of 3D printed nasal swabs for COVID-19 testing. His name is Albert and it’s time you get to know him. You’ve probably guessed, Albert is not a typical team member. He’s a state-of-the-art digital tool for materials development. Albert offers a cloud-based system that collects clean and harmonized data from every experiment conducted at the manager’s company, past and present, anywhere in the world. The manager is one of the company’s primary innovation leaders and works with Albert every day. And now, experts on the company’s research teams leverage the end-to-end R&D platform to create innovative solutions for their customers.

Rapid Solutions To Support COVID-19 Testing

The creation of nasal swabs for COVID-19 testing is a high-profile example of Albert’s ability to accelerate collaborative innovation. The Albert platform helped select the best possible material for the swabs by instantly reviewing over 16,000 formulations in the chemical company’s portfolio. By rapidly finding the needle in the haystack, Albert helped experts from two organizations swiftly corroborate, design, and produce millions of nasopharyngeal test swabs—a much needed part of the global battle against COVID-19. From beginning to end, the speed of production could not have been achieved with traditional methods.

“Traditional methods of keeping lab journals have now been replaced with digital tools and having one digital system that brings many aspects of research and development together is really powerful.”

With Big Data To Collaborative Innovation

Albert is making an impact at every stage of the chemical company’s product development process. By leveraging historical data and machine learning, the platform helps accelerate materials research and greatly reduces the number of experiments run. Live data of all available raw material batches helps innovators plan activities and identify stock locations quickly. And while they formulate with Albert, the platform delivers instant estimations of compositional costs and direct access to relevant safety considerations.

Additionally, laboratory management has never been easier. Albert ensures all tasks are completed on time and in accordance with standard procedures. The platform offers detailed notes on how to prepare and conduct formulations and tests in order to provide consistent and reliable results.

“Information about formulations, project designs, test methodologies and results was fragmented and sometimes hard to find.”

“With Albert, we now have everything in a digital format that teams from research and development worldwide can access with the click of a button. This makes us faster–and opens up opportunities for international collaboration and truly connected global teams.”

Albert Making An Impact Across The Globe

The initial introduction of Albert was exclusive to the 3D printing business, where it was piloted in two laboratories located in Dublin and Germany. The platform first expanded stateside to serve the electronics industry and is now supporting different areas and functions in R&D laboratories worldwide.

“It’s great to see Albert settling in at our organization and we’re all excited about working with him for many years to come.”

Ready to Learn More?

To learn more about how scientists worldwide are accelerating innovation with Albert’s end-to-end R&D platform, join us at our next Coffee with Albert, contact us for a product demo, or read more on our solution pages.