What were the main reasons you chose SciNote?
SciNote was very user-friendly, was priced competitively, and fit with our company’s workflow better than the other ELNs.
Can you tell us a bit about the company and your work?
Athens Research & Technology has been in business for more than 35 years. Our specialization is purifying native human and animal proteins critical to academic research and manufacturing in the Clinical Diagnostic, Cell Culture Media, Standards/Calibration, and antibody industries. We manufacture enzymes, inhibitors, lipoproteins, Holo/Apo Transferrins, and especially immunoglobulins.
Recently, we received the Globe Award – Exporter of the Year (2022) from the State of Georgia. This has been quite the honor for our company.
My role with the company has become product development. When we get inquiries for proteins we don’t currently purify, our team decides if there is a market opportunity and figures out what it would look like to scale those specific orders economically.
How did you decide to start using an electronic lab notebook? What were the challenges you were facing before implementing an ELN?
We began keeping paper lab notebooks at our inception over 35 years ago, so we have several hundred of these with historical data. As time progressed and the scope of our work widened, we felt keeping paper-only documents wouldn’t be feasible in the long run.
Data security was another motivating factor. We once had a faulty fire sprinkler go off and damage several notebooks. When this happened, we knew we had to find a better way to protect our data.
We had an overhead sprinkler go off once, and that water in the sprinkler had some sort of oil in it. So, the water actually ruined five or six notebooks – and we’re thinking, we’d better find a better way to do this.
What were the main reasons you chose SciNote?
I started looking into Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) just over two years ago. SciNote kept showing up in reviews and in the searches I was performing. I tested out several ELNs using their free trial accounts. Most proved to be too complex and too expensive. Scinote was very user-friendly, was priced competitively, and fit with our company’s workflow better than the others. It was going to be hard enough to sell our employees on this major change, moving from paper to electronic. My thought was, “the easier the platform, the easier the transition.”
SciNote was just easy to use. It fits the workflow within our company better than any of the others. So many of the others are so in-depth or detailed, that it was just overcomplicating what we needed. It helps that SciNote is priced competitively with the other big players.
What is your experience with the SciNote team?
The customer service and technical support has been outstanding. Since enrolling, we have had an implementation specialist working with us directly. I generally have answers to my questions within hours of reaching out by email. The support from the customer success team makes a world of difference.
To the customers, the support from the customer success team makes a world of difference.
How does SciNote fit into your workdays, and where is it the most helpful?
In the past, recording data was a lot like scrapbooking. We would cut out chromatographs and printouts from spectrophotometers or other equipment and add those to our books while also handwriting results and data. That process is essentially what we have begun doing in SciNote, only with more security and better data retrieval.
The search capabilities of SciNote make things easier as well. In the past, if we needed to review data from a previous project, it would take us between five to ten minutes just to retrieve that information. Now, I can sit down, do a search, and what I’m looking for is available in seconds.
SciNote’s stock management feature will allow us to have a better idea what a product costs to manufacture. We’re now able to track exactly what we’re using per project, allowing our team’s business side to create a bill of materials for each project. This feature also helps us ensure reagents are reordered in a timely manner.
SciNote’s stock management feature is going to be huge for us as far as being able to determine what exactly does a product cost us to make. We’re able to now track exactly what we’re using per project. We’ve got some others on the business side working on using this information to create a bill of materials for projects.
Do you have any tips for implementing SciNote?
Definitely read all the help files and watch all the videos tutorials that SciNote offers. Create a team to help in the planning and implementation process and use Scinote for several weeks to identify issues before rolling it out to the entire staff.
This testimonial was prepared based on a video interview with Chris Landers from Athens Research and Technology.
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