Evolution Rather Than Revolution – and a Bit of Imagination

An article from carl 03|2025

by Carolin Sage

For years now, there has been talk of digital transformation in industry. In the lab sector, it is clear that the idea of so-called future labs is already being offered on the market. But it is also possible to further develop an existing lab – even if there are obstacles to overcome along the way.

Imagine you walk into the building where your future lab is located. When you check-in, the building management system registers your arrival and, while you are still making your way to your workstation, starts tailoring everything to your work schedule in the background. The day before, from home, you had booked a bench in one of the smaller labs, complete with adjacent office space. You defined the room temperature, selected the appropriate lighting level and of course also ordered the necessary reagents. Right at this moment, these are being transported to your lab by robots. And the devices also already know that something is about to happen and wake up from their stand-by mode. Even the water bath has almost reached its target temperature already.

It looks like everything really can be adapted to your wishes in the future lab. But things don’t run entirely smoothly for you today. The magnetic stirrers are nowhere to be seen the bench. And the vent is also reporting an error. There’s no need to worry about the vent, because the responsible technician also receives a notification on his mobile phone at the same time as you. But the magnetic stirrers … You open your tablet and check the app to see where they are. Thanks to Bluetooth beacon tracking, you find them quickly: a colleague left them on their workstation yesterday. You send a quick voice message via the chat service. Telephone, e-mail, intranet are all now things of the past.  

The future lab is networked, communicative, automated and both cost-efficient and time-effiicent. It is flexible and sustainable, and FAIR data is no longer a foreign word. 

Admittedly, it sounds like something fresh from the printer at an advertising agency, but we can always dream. The extent to which the dream differs from reality varies greatly in the German laboratory sector. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology and Automation (IPA) in Stuttgart produced a study on this subject in 2021 [1]. 

They considered the extent to which lab employees are occupied with time-consuming and recurring tasks, and whether or not these correlate to the current degree of digitalisation, networking and automation.

To answer the question, the IPA researchers observed two areas in everyday lab work, analysing the extent to which the employees are occupied in these areas. The first area included activities that are not directly connected to conducting experiments. These could be, for example, time management, organising the chemicals store or cleaning up after a measurement. The second area covered the reproducibility of experimental results. In 90-minute interviews, 26 employees from different labs were then surveyed. Since the test group was small and a lot of other data was required to really obtain representative results, the team of authors refer to the study as a means of gauging the mood.

Nonetheless, the results are exciting, because the respondents spent a lot of time on activities that did not directly concern their lab experiments. The IPA team describes up to a third of working time as being non-value-adding (in the scientific sense). This ranges from tidying up to training courses and even long waiting times, such as when equipment is not available. And documentation is also time-consuming. So it’s no wonder that all those surveyed said they were in favour of paperless labs.

As far as the reproducibility of experiments is concerned, the respondents reported that they consider the quality of their own work to be the biggest influencing factor on whether or not their work delivers reliable results. They also indicated that they would repeat their experiments to make the results more reliable. According to the respondents, the factor that most significantly influences the reliability of results is human action and not so much the equipment being used. The fact that the reliability of the results is less dependent on the equipment is also seen in the assessment of the level of digitalisation, automation and networking of the equipment, because the respondents stated that they only consider their labs to be middling in this regard.

The IPA study is not alone in finding that digitalisation and automation have only gained a moderate foothold in the lab area. The digitalisation index, published each year by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, provides a broader insight into the status quo of digitalisation in German companies [2]. Even the most recently published report, for the year 2024, ranks the lab industry – represented by “Basic materials, chemistry and pharmaceuticals” – in fourth place out of seven, with a score of 94.4 index points [3]. 

In 2023, the lab industry scored almost 88 index points, falling significantly below the average of 105 points across all economic sectors. In addition, the index for the lab industry continued to fall consistently until the year 2023 – a trend that was not observed in other sectors. The report mentions downward trends in general: “It may be the case that digital progress made during the coronavirus pandemic – such as the development of digital products – […] has ceased again.” The report concludes succinctly: “The digitalisation of the economy in Germany made no significant progress in 2023. This may also be due to the continuing crisis situation.” In 2024, the lab sector did return to the level of 2021 with a score of 94.4 – but it still remained significantly lower than the current average of 112.5 index points.

The above-mentioned IPA study takes a slightly closer look at the obstacles, highlighting not only a lack of resources, such as time and money, but also a lack of expertise as well as a mistrust of technology and inadequate interest in technical and digitalised applications. The current IT infrastructure also makes restructuring more difficult, because of a lack of interfaces or incompatible devices.

University research labs are largely detached from the applications that are already digitalised or automated in companies. Researchers only rarely work with automated processes and usually use notebooks for documentation, which may even transfer to private ownership at the end of the research period. This is fatal, especially for research results that have not been published. Yet there is a lack of finance for a broader digital transformation, because the argument of reducing production costs through automation does not apply here. High staff turnover also stands in the way of transformation. 

In companies, however, things look brighter at first glance. Most specialist conferences and industry trade shows touch on the subject of digitalisation. Solutions for digital applications are available in droves – from VR goggles and smart cobots, which handle microtitre plates with extreme precision and breakneck speed, to drones, which transport blood samples to hospital labs when time is of the essence. Companies first started taking steps towards the introduction of ELNs and LIMS back at the start of the 2000s [4]. 

But the development of future labs is not about digitalising or automating individual work steps separately from each other. It’s primarily about creating an interconnected system. Andreas Traube, head of the “Health Industry” department at the Fraunhofer IPA and responsible for the subjects of laboratory automation and digitalisation, explains why this is important: “In a lab, it is often the case that the result of the work is not a product but a piece of information. How the results of an analysis come about is dependent on many factors, which are often not recorded or documented.” This would be different in a future lab, said Traube.

Just like an orchestra, all actors, i.e. devices, personnel and environment, play together here and respond to each other. People should be the conductors. Devices can be controlled individually via a Laboratory Execution System (LES). On the other hand, an LES can also be used to provide data and enable you to see, for example, whether the door of a freezer has been closed properly or if a specific magnetic stirrer is in operation. In this way, the documentation of experiments is also made much easier, because all relevant parameters are recorded automatically. 

Available at all times, easy access – it all sounds reminiscent of the familiar smart homes concept. And there are actually parallels, because even in a highly technical workplace like a lab, the software is not meant to deter. “Usability is really important,” said Traube. Employees in labs should be able to use the applications, even if they don’t have extensive technical skills. “We use dummies and test runs to try to gain an impression of the user experience even at a very early stage in software development,” he explained. This is the basis on which the applications are then ultimately also accepted. 

That’s all well and good, you might now be thinking. But, to have a smart future lab, do I have to wave goodbye to the lab inventory I have accumulated over the years? Who can afford that? Where’s the sustainability? “The path towards digital transformation should be evolutionary, even if it might also appear revolutionary to us, because a lot will change,” said Traube. However, lab equipment should be retained and become part of an integrative solution, if possible.

In order to enable devices to communicate with each other to a certain degree, you need communication standards. Only in this way can data be incorporated into the workflow of lab employees without having to be recorded separately and transferred. An example: during a photometric measurement, the volume values measured by an automated pipette for the production of a dilution series are transferred directly from the pipette to the software, which then creates the calibration line. There is no need to note the values down additionally and enter them in an analysis programme.

Newer devices already have one or even several connectivity standards, and it may be possible to retrofit older devices. So device manufacturers are already shaping the digital transformation – it’s now up to the users to drive it forward.

At least in thought, users have already befriended Lab 4.0. At Analytica 2024, an international trade show for lab technology, analytics and biotechnology, prospective customers had the opportunity to express their wishes for a future lab at Carl ROTH’s stand. A few of these are reflected on these pages. And what do you know? The wishes are amazingly close to the possibilities that can be offered by digitalised and automatic lab systems. More specifically, lab employees expressed a desire for automatic data transfer between work steps, eliminating the need for manual log creation. They wanted smart systems to control temperature and lighting in the lab and automated test series instead of many individual experiments. They even wanted robots and drones to be used to make work easier for employees in the lab. 

The real daredevils even wished for the perfect log, written by itself, as if through the magic of telepathy. In the absence of a suitable interface, however, that must still remain a dream for the foreseeable future. But who knows? Maybe there will be a suitable communication standard for this type of interaction at some point in the future too.

[1] M. Frahm et al., 2021, Fraunhofer IPA (Herausgeber), Digitalisierungsstand und digitale Realität in Life-Science-Laboren 
[2] J. Büchel et al., 2023, Digitalisierungsindex 2023. Digitalisierung der Wirtschaft in Deutschland, Kurzfassung der Ergebnisse des Digitalisierungsindex im Rahmen des Projekts „Entwicklung und Messung der Digitalisierung der Wirtschaft am Standort Deutschland“ im Auftrag des Bundesministeriums für Wirtschaft und Klimaschutz (BMWK), Köln
[3] J. Büchel et al., 2025, Digitalisierungsindex 2024. Digitalisierung der Wirtschaft in Deutschland, Kurzfassung. Projekt und Auftraggeber wie Quelle [2].
[4] R. Padilla, 2022, SpringerNature Report, The Digital Transformation of R&D: Navigating the Digital Lab and Solutions for Efficiency 
[5] www.sila-standard.com
[6] D Juchli, 2022, Cham: Springer International Publishing, 147-174
[7] L. Bromig et al., 2022, SoftwareX 17, 100991- 101002 

Image credits: Carl ROTH /  J. Büchel et al. 2024 (Digitalisierungsindex 2023, BMWK)