Takeaways from the 1st edition PLA® USA Conference

If you haven’t got the chance to attend the first edition of the Paperless Lab Academy® Conference in the USA this last month, we wanted to offer you this retrospective and hopefully having you consider joining the next edition in 2024.

The PLA® Conference is planned for offering a balanced mix of keynote presentations, workshops, panel discussions and interactive sessions catered for different learning preferences and levels of expertise.

More specifically, the #PLA2023USA program included speakers from various industries and functions. Both industry experts and end users shared their practical experiences and case studies. This diversity provided a well-rounded perspective on the challenges and opportunities of digital transformation journeys in the laboratories.

In addition, the industry experts centred their presentations around the main theme of the event, “Master your eData Lifecycle” and each session had clear goals of how and where they wanted to steer the discussions.

Embrace an Ecosystem Mindset for Successful Digital Transformation

The ecosystem mindset refers to viewing digital transformation as an interconnected and collaborative effort involving various stakeholders, both within and outside the organization. It recognizes that no single technology or department can drive successful transformation in isolation.  Instead, organizations are encouraged to create a dynamic ecosystem of partners, technologies, and talent that work seamlessly together to achieve common goals.

Pat Pijanowski, John Conway and Lloyd Colegrove drew our attention to what lessons we could learn from the massively successful consumer-led digital transformation and what we could use to shift our own digital transformation strategy in the lab to be more driven by an ‘ecosystem mentality’

To successfully bring digital transformation to the lab, we all need to think a bit differently than we have in the past. We need to adopt an “ecosystem mindset” instead of an “application mindset”

Rely on Fundamental Quality Culture for Quality Production 

In the search for a definition of culture, every anthropologist has a slightly different view of what culture means. However, there are common elements in answering the question of what culture encompasses. Culture is the holistic combination of learned and shared beliefs, values and practises that create cohesion in a group.

The employees of a company thus form a group that works and acts in the way they believe is expected of their company, or better still, in the way expected of everyone role and responsibility.

Mark Newton, Chinmoy Roy and George Bernstein drew our attention to the importance of the human factor for a successful transformation of the digital lab.

They emphasise the responsibility of top management to foster a culture of quality in the organisation from top to bottom and to empower everyone through learning opportunities, mentoring, coaching and the promotion of transparency and ownership at all levels.

They also magnificently cover the delicate topic of balancing business needs with compliance gaps.  Highliging the relevance to consider compliance as a function that is judged on how it supports the business but also recommending business to understand how important quality requirements, and therefore compliance, are to the success of the business itself.

Master your Data Management for easier Innovation and Scaling 

In a data-driven world, companies that succeed in gaining actionable insights through data management will be able to innovate faster, develop better strategies and manage change more efficiently.

Many organisations today, especially global organisations, have hundreds of separate applications and systems where data that crosses departments or divisions can easily become fragmented, duplicated and usually obsolete. When this is the case, answering even the most basic but critical questions about any kind of performance metric or KPI becomes a problem for an organisation.

Fundamentally, the need for accurate, timely information is acute, and with the proliferation of data sources, it is an ongoing challenge to manage them consistently and keep data definitions up to date so that all parts of an organisation are using the same information.

Luke Guerrero and Patrick Courtney explained us that organizations have initiated the conversation about scaling their software usage and mastering data management. Luke talk summarized the current state and suggested pathways for organizations that think differently and want to learn from the successes in biotech and other industries. While Patrick dive into the role of standards and ontologies explaining how SiLA (Standardization in Lab Automation) and AnIML (Analytical Information Markup Language) could drive automation, data management, and machine learning.

Those are few glances to what happen at the PLA® Conference USA this last month. We look forward to welcoming at the next edition in the USA, Europe or India in 2024.

Access here the presentations 

 

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