Why Should you Automate?

There is no doubt that we live in an era of automation in every aspect of our lives, with new innovative technology being developed to help us.  Whatever the application, it seems that automation can help to increase productivity, efficiency and consistency whilst giving us back valuable time to work on less repetitive, time consuming, error prone tasks.

Just because you can automate, it doesn’t mean you should.  Clearly, you need to audit your workflows and define the parts of the process that take up time, are repetitive, hands on, requires a lot of precision, sources of error and causing bottlenecks in your workflow.

NHS lab embarks on a journey to automation

The haemato-oncology flow cytometry lab at Cambridge University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust were experiencing many of the common challenges that diagnostic flow cytometry labs experience such as, consistency of sample preparation, a lack of space to work in, staffing pressures including skill mix, and the burden of increased documentation requirements.

They decided to embark on a journey to automation as they needed a solution that removed manual processes, increased efficiency, and provided control over standardisation of processes.
 

Watch the testimonial and find out more about why the staff at the Cambridge University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust chose the integrated BD solution, the BD FACSLyric^™ Flow Cytometer, physically integrated with the BD FACSDuet^™ Premium Sample Preparation System, as the solution that will help them move their time-consuming, hands-on tasks to automated workflows.  Through implementation of automation, not only have the lab managed to address the challenges that they were experiencing, they have managed to reallocate staff time to more value-adding tasks.
 

"The BD FACSDuet^™ Premium combined with BD FACSLyric^™ allows us to achieve the consistency and standardization of our processes, together with the complete audit trail to satisfy our quality management system, ISO 15189  and other regulatory requirements." (Dave Bloxham)​
 

​"Automation would reduce pressure on staff, allowing them to focus on service delivery and development needs." (Fiona Cullen)​
 

"​…with the addition of onboard washing and centrifugation, ...the BD FACSDuet™ Premium is going to allow us to increase our workload capacity and reduce our overall turnaround times……... we can now easily prepare cocktails which removes error prone steps in these processes.  The BD FACSDuet^™  Premium can perform this task in less than a quarter of the time , provides full traceability of reagents and completely eliminates those error-prone steps" (Fiona Cullen)​

Review data collected in collaboration with three independent European laboratories that assesses the impact of automating flow cytometry workflows.