2020

Annual Review

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.

For all of us, 2020 has been a year like no other. Instead of gloating about what the company has achieved, I want to use this end of the year message to say ‘Thank you’.

Thank you to all the doctors and nurses that were in the frontline taking care of everyone that suffered from SARS-COV-2 including some of our own. Thank you to the scientific community that has worked harder than ever to find a cure to this pandemic. Thank you to all the laboratories that despite the unique constraints continued to trust our products to optimize their research. Thank you to our team that was able to outperform whilst facing new challenges.

Simon Bungers, CEO and Co-Founder of Labforward

Our electronic lab notebook, Labfolder provides a centralized platform to store and manage all your research data. Compared to traditional lab books, the accessibility and searchability of data is greatly enhanced. More importantly, many research organizations are convinced that this is indeed the future of data documentation.

Laboperator is continuously adding on to their device portfolio, making it just so much easier to connect lab equipment and build them into workflows. Needless to say, that the remote monitoring and controlling of devices will be a great benefit in future work setups.

Team

Team Members

Nationalities

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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:

Product & Engineering

Work behind the scenes of the Product & Engineering teams has been focused on the connectivity of both our products. This interoperability has been nicely showcased using prototypes in previous trade fairs and a dedicated webinar throughout this year. Not long to go until scientists can pick a protocol, execute the workflows and save all results with a few easy clicks in our software solutions.

Laboperator

Releases

4652

commits

3840

files changed

273880

code insertions (+)

129679

code deletions (-)

While executing your experiment using manual and automated step, scientists now have the possibility to add even more contextual information. The new vertical panel for Laboperator workflows can be filled with static or dynamic values specifying the entire workflow or individual steps.
Ultimately, all collected data can be transferred with one easy click to any external storage space, such as your ELN system.

Labfolder

Releases

11757

commits

4438

files changed

224025

code insertions (+)

291842

code deletions (-)

This year Labfolder users were enlightened with several performance and usability improvements, such as the copy/paste from clipboard functionality.

The main focus of our developmental efforts was the Material Database App. We provided a completely new look and feel to our inventory management tool. Additional rights & roles help to manage the access to lab materials more efficiently and the incorporation of existing inventory lists is greatly simplified, thanks to the new import and export features.

Marketing & Customer Success

901

Questions submitted

110

Hours (Average 1st Response Time)

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:

4 Disruptive Technologies of the Laboratory

IoT in scientific research

How IoT is Revolutionizing Research and Development

Productivity in pharma could be drastically improved with IoT implementation

Three Reasons Why Automation Can Benefit Your Laboratory

The rush for a COVID-19 vaccine highlights the need for digital solutions

Where we’re heading:

Without giving away too many spoilers, here a few things to look forward to in 2021!

> 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.