Elemental Machines has announced a new scalable solution to help lab professionals more effectively and intuitively manage their equipment. Our new Floorplan view provides a detailed digital representation of your real-world workspace. Now you will be able to easily upload and create your own custom floor plans, strategically placing equipment and viewing the status of every asset on the floor — in real time.
With customizable tools like Floorplan in your connectivity toolbox, you can gather the intelligence needed to shape strategies, improve operational efficiencies, and maximize ROI. The days of the lab manager as reactor-in-chief are finally over. Today, digital data drives LabOps — and you hold the keys.
Track and Troubleshoot in No Time
With an ever-growing list of responsibilities for lab managers, no two days are the same. Not only are they relied on to ensure the smooth operation and compliant conditions of the lab, but they’re also accountable for potentially hundreds, sometimes thousands, of pieces of equipment. Add in the complexity of labs and production environments that exist across multiple locations, addresses, floors, and rooms, and it’s easy to see why today’s lab manager needs a better way to keep track of alerting equipment in a more visual and representative manner.
With the new Elemental Machines’ Floorplan view, you can:
- See specific equipment and its status in a 2D top-down view
- Upload a specific floor plan and add or move equipment around
- See alerts in real time in the actual lab layout
- Identify and share equipment locations with staff
- And a whole lot more!
Customizable Features: Because No Two Labs Are the Same
A version of the new Floorplan view will be available to all Elemental Machines’ customers, and its many features can be turned on or off based on your specific lab needs:
- Home provides an overview that includes all available floorplans in two views — Preview Carousel and a Table View. Floorplans can be starred to place them at the top in a carousel-style preview. The carousel preview is then sorted by most recently viewed.
- View Mode is the main way of seeing items on a floorplan and contains two major sections: Floorplan Preview and Device Tray. The Device Tray can be hidden but appears for many user-interactions and serves as the main preview for devices. View Mode contains a user-uploaded image/pdf of their floor plan.
- Interactions with Floorplan are user-friendly and easy to learn. You can click and drag on empty areas of the floorplan to pan up/down/left/right. You can also zoom in and out using a zoom widget, the scroll wheel of your mouse, or you can pinch/zoom on touch-enabled devices. Clicking an element will show its information in the device tray, and clicking a group of elements will zoom to a level where all the elements are visible. The Edit View allows you to edit a floor plan and move elements around.
- Future features are in the works or being planned. Users will soon be able to upload their existing floor plan and get an AI-interpretation that can be converted to SVG. They’ll also be able to draw a floorplan using built-in tools, select and place equipment from a list that aligns with their equipment list, and connect resources to the floor plan in different areas.
Sleep Easy, We Got This
Our customers spoke, and we listened: Lab managers want a digital representation of what’s happening on the lab floor at all times. And they want a top-down view of their floor plans with access to insights at any time, from anywhere on the floor.
Speaking of the real world, here’s a real example: If a piece of equipment alerts in the middle of the night, the lab manager has two ways of addressing the issue:
- They can get out of bed, still half asleep, drive 45 minutes to the lab, locate the alerting machine, work to solve the issue, drive 45 minutes back home, crawl back into bed, toss and turn for a few hours watching the clock wondering what’s happening on the lab floor, get up to go back to the lab, exhausted from a sleepless night.
Or …
- They can check the Floorplan view, locate the issue from the comfort of their home, contact the night crew with the equipment identification and location, and even send a screenshot to help diagnose the concern. Ahh … easy peasy, go back to sleepy.
The efficiency, convenience, and peace of mind the new Floorplan view brings means less time worrying about what might go wrong, and more time building strategies that grow your business.
Mission Control at Any Size
“The real-time equipment status features of Floorplan view will change the way you manage your lab,” says Tim Golnik, VP of Product and Design at Elemental Machines. “It’s your own version of Mission Control, all the information you need is easy to access wherever you are. We designed Floorplan to work on a variety of platforms — iPads, iPhones, a giant 4K monitor in the middle of the lab — so no matter where you need it, your information is there. And it’s always the right info, because you’re always pinpointing the right locations and diagnosing the right equipment, and you’re doing it faster and with more accuracy.”
The ability to see everything in the lab makes it easier to track what’s going on, everywhere in the lab. Floorplan view enables companies with several different floorplans to navigate with ease. And the location data are useful regardless of your lab’s size. The minute you have more than two pieces of equipment, location and relation matter a lot more. Having a digital representation of the physical world is more than just a helpful tool to have; you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it.
Need another real-world example? Let’s say you have a view of 100 pieces of equipment in your lab. With Floorplan view, you can drag every piece of equipment onto one large map. This grouping capability lets you create a group for staff focused on specific types of equipment, like freezers. Awareness, alerts, and analysis are now all tuned in to and centered on freezers, so staff can see everything in one place and see only the equipment they’re responsible for.
It can be a challenge for lab managers to anticipate exactly what every single user is going to want to see. Individuals have their own way of looking at the world and the lab floor. Our Floorplan view gives managers the power to assign responsibilities and keep everybody on the same map, even when they’re only looking at certain parts of it. This provides a much-appreciated level of control for administrators, and a level of autonomy for individual users.
See Your Assets in a Whole New Way
At Elemental Machines, our innovative connectivity solutions are designed to help your organization run efficiently and proactively. Our platform thrives on flexibility and adaptability, offering custom integrations that seamlessly mesh with your existing infrastructure. Whether it’s in the lab or on the manufacturing floor, our asset management and laboratory digitization solutions future-proof your operations, ensuring you scale and grow with productive precision from day one.
Stop fighting fires and start building strategies. Contact us today and discover how Elemental Machines’ Floorplan view streamlines your asset management, enhances efficiency, and helps you sleep at night.