At Elemental Machines, our service to the LabOps community has given us a front-row seat to many of the thrills and headaches experienced by the modern lab manager.
Among the most puzzling challenges we’ve observed is the dearth of scheduling tools created specifically for lab settings. Many of our customers have (to their credit) hacked together makeshift shared calendars, sometimes creating separate calendars for each piece of lab equipment in order to notify teams when a particular asset will be in use.
For the last 18 months, the scheduling snafus have been tampered by skeleton crews working in sparsely populated labs, enjoying free rein to use equipment as they please. As teams return to their labs in full (or even more complexly, in hybrid mode), the time is right for a long-overdue solution.
The calendar chaos ends today.
Introducing Elemental Calendar
Elemental Machines is thrilled to announce the debut of a new (and FREE) tool for the LabOps community called Elemental Calendar.
Elemental Calendar is a new tab debuting on the Elemental Machines dashboard that allows lab managers to schedule assets with ease, complete with corresponding protocols, primary investigators, and more.
For existing Elemental Machines customers, the system harnesses existing data to pre-populate the names of team members and assets. In other words, no setup is required.
For those new to Elemental Machines, the calendar is a free tool offered to the LabOps community with no strings attached.
(Interested lab managers can sign up for free accounts here.)
How It Works
Once logged in to the Elemental Machines dashboard, users will find a new tab labeled Calendar. Clicking on the tab will present a list of assets, which can be filtered by location, asset type, or both.
To add a new asset, click Create New Asset. Enter a make and model, then use the drop-down menu to select an asset type. Options are pre-populated, or can be customized by typing and hitting Enter.
To schedule, simply click on an asset.
Beginning with a protocol, fill out the required information. Select a primary investigator by selecting from a pre-populated list or type a new name and hit Enter. Participants defaults to the person scheduling the event, but that can be changed to one or more people. Click Submit.
Your asset reservation will now appear alongside those of all others, no redundant calendars required.