For many of us, 2020 has been a year like no other. Despite the new challenges in our work and private lives, we made the most of it and want to share some of our stories with you:

After emerging from two independent companies, we are growing closer together – both as a team and a platform. This year, our first customers are using Labfolder and Laboperator synergistically, and  the awareness of technological enhancements that support scientists around the globe is highly increased.

Reflecting on this year’s achievements, we looked at the progress in each of our departments, from those who are developing our products, to the HR team and our customer support.

To build great products, all team members need to be able to successfully work as a team, have the confidence to take ownership if needed and continuously grow in their learnings. All these things can only be achieved if our employees feel comfortable and happy at work, therefore our company culture is very important to us!

From the HR side, we value social relations to help build a team that works effectively together. New team members are welcomed in ‘introductory rounds’ that engage everyone to answer a random question. Every Friday, the entire team gets together for a TGIF session to exchange on themed events, such as meeting our customers as they present the work they do and how they use our ELN.

Now, in times of a remote work setup, these habits have not changed – we just had to find new ways to connect to each other, usually by Google Meet:

Throughout the year, our dedicated Support Team has not only assisted customers with their questions but also set up and successfully executed several live webinars. The topics of creating reproducible protocols and the capability to easily search and find research information were highlights of the series. Overall, the participants highly recommended the webinars, as most of the presented information could be directly applied to their work routines, especially as some of our tips and tricks covered information that users had not been aware of.

Laboperator

As part of our webinar series, the integration of Laboperator and Labfolder was of great interest for existing and potential customers. Many scientists from the academic and industry sector joined our product expert to get the first glance on this prototype of the connected laboratory:

Labfolder

Together with the help of our customers from various research backgrounds, we were able to build a new Solutions section on our website. Based on customer feedback we shed light on the most important functionalities in our ELN for researchers in different scientific fields.

This year we also published a number of blog posts, articles and press releases to keep our customers informed about our product updates along with new technological developments in the laboratory. Here are some of our articles:

Where we’re heading:

Without giving away too many spoilers, here are a few things to look forward to in the coming year!

• > In 2021, we want to enable our customers to achieve their goals by launching a new features in our products, along with improvements to existing features.
• > During the next year, we will continue to closely integrate all our products to provide a comprehensive solution for the connected lab of the future.
• > To support our customers, we strive for the best possible service and aim to strengthen our user’s knowledge about the benefits of these new technologies.

Our vision is to create an entirely unified, flexible, innovative environment where scientists can safely store their research data. Digital technologies and software are at the forefront of laboratory evolution, they alter the way experiments are executed and how findings are recorded and analysed. This new layer of connectivity allows for more expedited, efficient research to be conducted. Labforward is a company which excels in creating software for the laboratory, in the next year we hope to continue our mission to strive towards a more connected laboratory.