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User Guide

Using CMS Life Sciences day to day.

From the morning dashboard to end-of-study disposition — how the platform guides your team through the sample lifecycle, with every step gated and audit-logged.

Start here

Dashboard overview.

The dashboard surfaces the day's work and the system's health, so the team can focus on exceptions rather than manual review.

  • Morning briefing of today's incoming shipments
  • Transfer / return gap indicator catches sample imbalances
  • Review queue for pending approvals — approve, reject, or escalate, with overdue items flagged automatically
  • System status panel for component health and queued records
  • Triage pattern auto-advances clean work and routes exceptions to the right person, rather than surfacing every item as a task
The sample lifecycle

A guided workflow for every stage.

Each stage is gated, attributable, and audit-logged — no step happens off-system.

Receiving

A four-gate reception wizard — manifest, parcel inspection, barcode scanning, and validation — captures shipment details and condition checks before anything is accepted.

Available

Barcode scanning

Live operator scanning timestamps every sample to a named operator from the first touch.

Available

Tracking

Search and filter samples across lifecycle status and storage hierarchy — always know where a sample is and what state it's in.

Available

Transfers & returns

Inter-freezer, inter-site, and inter-study movements run through approval chains with SLA deadlines and custody hand-off.

Available

Reconciliation

Expected-vs-actual counts and field mismatches surface for guided resolution, each correction captured with a reason-for-change.

Available

Disposition

End-of-study destroy, retain, or deplete decisions with custodian sign-off, optional two-person authorization, a tracked deadline per sample, and linked evidence documents.

Available
Biobanking

Discovery and operations for the biobank.

Discovery is fully available today. Operations features are in active development — badges below reflect current status honestly.

Discovery search

Natural-language and structured search across the annotated library, with consent scope and restrictions shown on every result.

Available

Consent-gated reuse

Broad consent proceeds; restricted requires acknowledgment; expired is blocked with alternatives suggested.

Available

Bulk accessioning

Batch barcode intake with statistical spot-check validation instead of individual verification.

In progress

Freezer hierarchy & relocation

Eight-level storage model with bulk relocation and full physical-scan confirmation.

In progress

Capacity planning

Utilization heat maps and projected growth overlays.

In progress
Reports

Compliance and operations reporting.

Four reports, all built on the same underlying audit and activity data — no separate export pipeline to maintain.

Audit trail

Every event, filterable by user and action type, tagged with the ALCOA+ principle it satisfies, exportable to CSV.

Ethics & consent approvals

Approval status and expiry across studies, with alerts for anything lapsing.

Chain of custody

The full per-sample timeline from receipt through disposition.

Effort & capacity

Manager-level effort by activity type (reception, transfer, return, reconciliation, disposition), plus capacity projections against your storage breakpoint.

What you'll see depends on your role.

Every screen is gated by access rights, so each role sees exactly the dashboards and actions it's authorized for. See the full role → access mapping in the Configuration Guide.