Lab Operations

Five applications, one lab, one record underneath.

Sample management, biobanking, LIMS connectivity, analytical work and the vivarium. Five applications, each doing its own job, all writing to the same governed record — so an excursion in one is visible to the study in another, and your quality team learns the system once.

The problem

The lab runs as one operation. Its record does not.

Reception, storage, the instrument bench, the analytical lab, the animal facility. Each keeps a record that is complete on its own terms, and each is a separate place to look. Ask a question that crosses two of them and somebody assembles the answer by hand.

  • Each area keeps its own record, in its own system, with its own login
  • A question that spans two of them is answered by hand, from memory and a spreadsheet
  • Something going wrong in one place is noticed by a person, somewhere else, late
  • What was affected, and for how long, is worked out afterward rather than known at the time
  • Anything new brings a record of its own rather than joining the one you have
The applications

What runs under Lab Operations.

Five views of one governed record, which is why an event in any of them can trigger, gate or explain something in another.

Available

Sample Management

Manifest intake, guided reception, scanning, tracking, distribution, reconciliation and end-of-study disposition. The shipped core.

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Available

Biobanking

Sample management built for the biobank: long-term custody, consent-gated reuse, discovery search and capacity planning.

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In progress

LIMS Connectivity

Connect the systems of record you already run, so they exchange information reliably and somebody can audit what moved.

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In progress

Analytical

Assay ordering, result capture, specification checking and release, recorded on the sample itself rather than beside it.

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In progress

Vivarium Monitoring

Continuous facility conditions, joined to the studies they affect, on the same record as everything else.

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In-lab monitoring

The lab is a physical place, and it is already telling you things.

Sensor connectivity is where lab operations stops being a records problem and starts being a real-time one. The same connection and streaming model that carries instrument output carries environmental and welfare readings — which means an excursion is an event in the sample's own history, not an entry in a separate log that someone reconciles later.

Cold chain & storage conditions

Continuous freezer, fridge, and shipper temperature against the samples actually inside them, so an excursion resolves to an affected sample list rather than a unit ID.

Welfare & activity monitoring

Cage- and rack-level sensing in animal facilities — movement, drinking, and activity change — so a deviation surfaces as an alert during the night rather than an observation at the morning round.

Room & facility conditions

Ambient temperature, humidity, differential pressure, and door events across rooms and suites, held to the same audit standard as any other record.

Hardware-agnostic by design

Sensors and cage hardware come from whoever makes the best of them. The platform is the data and governance layer over that hardware — which is precisely the gap the sensor vendors themselves do not want to fill.

Conditions across the lab and the facility, read continuously and joined to the material and studies they affect.

Operating in real time

From a record you query to an operation you watch.

Records tell you what happened. Lab operations needs to know what is happening — and the platform's hot tier is the difference between the two.

  • Live streams from device and system activity with no polling on your side
  • A change feed that fires whenever the workspace configuration itself changes
  • Warm queries over data still in motion, so a threshold is checked as it is crossed
  • Every alert and acknowledgement recorded as an attributable, timestamped event
Lab operations — live
Freezer −80 · Room 2
−79.4 °C
Shipper INB-4471
Excursion 12m
Instrument feeds online
18 / 19
Cage racks reporting
96 / 96
Samples at risk
0
Platform capabilities

What every platform capability does for lab operations.

CMS Life Sciences is built on Open Industrial, a platform built for exactly this class of problem in industrial operations. Here is its entire published capability set, with what each one is for when the operation being run is a lab.

  • Workspaces & provisioning

    Available

    A governed workspace provisioned on sign-up — no installation, no server build — with your team invited into it under their own roles.

    Read the docs

    One workspace spans samples, instruments, freezers, robots, and rooms, instead of one system per island each with its own login and its own version of the truth. Provisioned at sign-up, with your team invited into it under their own roles.

  • Deployment options

    Available

    Evaluation, Fully-Managed, or Bring-Your-Own-Cloud — three tiers with an identical compliance, audit, and access model.

    Read the docs

    Facility and welfare data is some of the most sensitive data a lab holds. Run in your own cloud tenant and it never leaves infrastructure you control — with the same audit trail, access model, and compliance behaviour as the managed tier.

  • Granularity of control

    Available

    Drafts, commits, undo/redo, proposals, and forks — configuration is versioned like a document, so nothing is permanent until someone says so.

    Read the docs

    A new alert threshold, a rebalanced robot schedule, a changed escalation path — drafted, reviewed, committed, and reversible. Operational change stops being a deployment and becomes something a lab manager can make and a QA reviewer can read.

  • API & connection nodes

    Available

    Two integration patterns: an API node that polls a system on a schedule, or a Connection node that receives events as they happen.

    Read the docs

    The freezer, the incubator, the cage rack, the robotic arm, the LIMS, and the badge reader all attach through the same two node types — polled or pushed. OPC UA and SCADA, which most lab automation and building systems speak natively, are roadmap; today those systems connect through their REST, file, or broker interfaces.

  • Cold, warm & hot data

    Available

    Download the history, query what is flowing now, or subscribe to a live stream and a configuration change feed.

    Read the docs

    Cold gives you a year of temperature history for an excursion investigation. Warm answers which units are drifting right now. Hot pushes a live feed to the operations screen, and a change feed fires whenever the workspace configuration itself changes.

  • Custom nodes & extensibility

    In progress

    A pluggable node model behind every connection, query, and dashboard. First-party node types today; customer self-service authoring is roadmap.

    Read the docs

    Robotics and instrument vendors ship islands, and a new node type is how an unintegrated arm, reader, or cage sensor becomes a first-class participant in the same flow as everything else. Built by our team on the shipped node model today; self-service authoring is roadmap.

  • the assistant, the AI operator

    Available

    A workspace-aware assistant with context on your real connections and flows. It drafts proposals for review and never mutates anything directly.

    Read the docs

    Ask which freezers drifted last night, which robot runs stalled, or which racks stopped reporting — and get an answer grounded in your actual workspace. The assistant drafts new monitors, queries, and dashboards as proposals for a person to approve.

  • MCP server

    Available

    Any MCP-native model can read, query, and propose. There is no accept tool — proposals only ever land through a person in the workspace UI.

    Read the docs

    Any MCP-native model can read the lab's live state, run queries across it, and propose new monitoring, but cannot enact anything. The absence of an accept tool is the architecture, not a policy — which is what makes agents usable in a regulated facility at all.

  • Roles & access administration

    Available

    Named access rights, bundled into custom configurations, assigned to people — with Viewer/Editor/Admin as the starting default, not the ceiling.

    Read the docs

    A vivarium technician, a facilities engineer, a study director, and an external auditor each need a different lab. Named access rights bundled into custom configurations give each of them exactly their own, and every assignment is itself audited.

  • Audit trail & data integrity

    Available

    Every governed mutation produces its own compliance evidence structurally — attributable, timestamped, append-only, and mapped to an ALCOA+ principle.

    Read the docs

    The audit machinery is already load-bearing for sample custody: attributable, timestamped, append-only, each event tagged with the ALCOA+ principle it satisfies. Monitoring runs on that same spine, so an excursion and its acknowledgement are evidence rather than a side channel.

  • System upgrades

    Roadmap

    The planned linked-environment model — promote a change from testing through staging into production on your own change-control steps.

    Read the docs

    Planned: promote a monitoring configuration or workflow change from a testing environment through staging into production on your own change-control steps — so a change to a facility's alerting is as controlled as a change to a study.

  • Validation data & custom reporting

    Roadmap

    Audit-trail export today, with broader validation-data downloads and custom compliance reporting planned.

    Read the docs

    Audit-trail export is live today. Broader validation-data downloads and custom compliance reports and dashboards over operational and environmental data are planned.

Connect the lab you actually have.

Bring us the islands — the LIMS, the freezers, the robots, the sensors, the spreadsheet holding it together — and we will show you the layer that spans them.