Implementing IAM was a company-wide effort, with the Labfolder team committing many hours towards optimizing our ELN to be compatible with the new access management platform. Enhancements include re-authentication processes triggered by IAM within the Labfolder application – for example: when using the Sign & Witness or Signature Workflows Features, during session timeouts, when altering user settings,  and when displaying deactivated users.

The mobile view of the Labfolder application was also improved: Notebook headers are now more compact, text and data can now be edited with greater ease, pop-up windows (while editing, for example) now open full-screen, and Well Plate Templates and Table Elements are enabled for mobile usage.

The Marketing and Communications team has been working hard to provide our customers with the information and guidance needed to enable their laboratory digitalization journeys. Whether through blogs, articles, events or webinars alongside our partners, we’ve been diligently communicating new product features, partnerships and our vision for the connected laboratories of the future. In particular, we have expanded our presence at events throughout the year, attending Achema, Analytica, Lab Innovations, SmartLab exchange among many others. After the pandemic restrictions prevented these events from taking place in person over the past couple of years, it was a thrilling experience to be able to converse directly with prospective customers, industry leaders and existing partners once more. In 2023, we are looking forward to participating in more events including SmartLab Exchange (Amsterdam, 22-23/02), SLAS (San Diego, 25-01/02), The Paperless Lab Academy (18-19/04), Pharma Automation & Robotics (20-21/04), Labvolution (9-11/05), & our first LADS forward Hackathon hosted in partnership with Spectaris in our Connectivity Space in Berlin.

More recently we also kicked-off our Partner Webinar Series with a segment on Change Management featuring partners from Clustermarket, Düperthal Connect, Fluics, bAhead, and Julabo and hosted 35 attendees. In 2023, we are especially looking forward to expanding our Partner Webinar Series, with our next segment already scheduled for January 23rd on Sustainability in the Lab.

This year, our Business Development and Customer Success teams were busy supporting our client’s journeys, introducing our product suite to exciting prospective customers, and expanding our new and existing partnerships. After all, our overall intent is to make our customer’s laboratories more efficient and productive than ever and not only provide them with our solutions, but provide them with an entire network of like-minded partners to help them accomplish their goals.

Towards this, 90% of our customers reported that Labfolder helps them achieve their goals and 94% of our customers plan to use the ELN in the long-term. In addition to hosting demos, resolving support tickets and publishing Helpdesk articles, Customer Success and Business Development welcomed 118 new customers and created 8 new video tutorials. We also hosted 150 attendees across 6 Webinars on pertinent themes such as Cold Storage Monitoring, Data Organization, and Lab 4.0.

We continually strive to cultivate a happy and healthy working environment. Not only are we proud of Labforward being a great place to work, but our collaborative and connected working environment reflects and embodies our company’s goal of fostering connected and efficient laboratories.

Towards our people-oriented goals, we grew our team by 47 new hires and continued to support the career development of our employees. In particular, 33% of employees received a raise and/or promotion in 2022 and 6% were enabled for a role change within the company. We continue to prioritize diversity within the company, with 32 nationalities represented at Labforward, and a 77% increase in female engineers from 2021 to 2022. While we love building an international team, immigrating to Germany is, unfortunately, not straightforward. Therefore, to facilitate the relocation of our international employees to Berlin, we partnered with Expath and successfully relocated 17 new employees.

We promote a flexible and trustful working environment by continuing to support hybrid (16% of employees) and remote-first working (51% of employees), while also supporting our office-first employees (33% of employees) in our Berlin headquarters. Since we welcomed so many new employees, we have now outgrown our Berlin office space. To support our continued growth, we began expanding the office to the floor below, and will continue  working on this expansion in 2023.

To connect all members of our team (regardless of geographical location), we also held lively team events throughout the year such as our summer retreat in Dresden, Thanksgiving Potluck, and End of Year Event. We also continued our weekly TGIF events, with engaging topics such as the importance of diversity, LGBTQ friendliness, and debate club. Overall, we were thrilled to surpass our eNPS (a measure of employee engagement and satisfaction) target of 35, instead scoring 56 and will continue to prioritize our team’s involvement and happiness in the year to come.