Navigating the ELN Adoption Journey: Finding the Best Approach for Your Organization

Once a research organization realizes it needs the benefits of an electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) like Revvity Signals Notebook, they begin to consider the process of rolling it out. What are the best practices for ensuring smooth implementation? What approaches will facilitate adoption among the scientific staff? What communication strategies work best?

At a roundtable event, Revvity Signals Notebook customers—from various types of organizations and with different starting points—compared their adoption journeys and shared the best practices they learned along the way.
 

Adopting New Software Solutions in R&D

In research and development, teams face mounting pressure to increase productivity and accelerate decision-making while managing growing experimental complexity. Yet many organizations struggle with retrospective documentation, inconsistent data formats across various platforms, and limited ability to mine research data for insights.

A next-generation, cloud-based ELN like Signals Notebook is a critical tool to address these challenges. This type of effective and intuitive solution is pivotal in enabling real-time scientific documentation, ensuring data quality, and breaking down departmental silos.

The transition to a unified, purpose-built ELN solution like Signals Notebook represents more than a technology upgrade. Implementing modern software for R&D is a strategic investment in research quality, compliance, and collaborative capabilities that can transform how organizations manage their intellectual capital and accelerate innovation.
 

Different ELN Adoption Methods for Diverse Starting Points

Organizations implementing Signals Notebook have diverse starting points—from paper-based systems to legacy ELNs. The adoption journey looks different depending on where the organization begins.

For instance, the Electronics Division of one of our clients began with researchers using various documentation methods—OneNote, Word, Excel, paper notes, and several legacy ELNs. Their challenge wasn't just adopting new software, but consolidating disparate practices across the organization.

For larger pharma organizations, with established electronic documentation systems, implementation was quite straightforward; their users just needed to adapt to new workflows and capabilities. A large-scale pharmaceutical client of Revvity Signals rolled out the platform to 1200 people in six weeks, and only two people complained that it was too fast. They also found it helpful to switch over during the December break, allowing users to wrap up current work in the old system and start fresh experiments in the new platform upon their return.
 

Proven ELN Adoption Strategies

Taking learnings from our clients we can build best practices for streamlining adoption of Signals Notebook.

• Build a Dedicated Support Ecosystem

  An Electronics Division within one of our clients created a comprehensive support structure in the form of a dedicated service team that included both IT and business staff, as well as a dedicated developer team. This multi-tiered support approach ensured users had the resources they needed. They also offered office hours during and after the rollout, allowing users to dial in and ask whatever questions they had.

  Another helpful technique was adding a button in every experiment that connected users directly to a Teams chat, where they could get help from colleagues. “We've probably saved hundreds of tickets through this approach,” the administrator noted.

• Create Tailored Training Programs

  Various organizations emphasized the importance of role-specific, accessible training. That same electronics division mentioned above produced training videos in local languages—Japanese, Chinese, and Korean—which users could access anytime. Others found that creating training videos based on people’s roles was most effective—for example, highlighting different features for biologists and chemists.

  On the other hand, businesses with already established electronic documentation systems found that training requirements were much lower. Offering tips and tricks on their website and recording short videos on how to use particular features was enough, because their researchers found the solution very intuitive.

• Establish Clear Communication Channels

  For one of our large-scale pharma clients and their team, direct communication with end users—not just managers—proved extremely valuable. Sometimes this was as simple as letting employees know that a new rollout was coming, when it would happen, and what to expect during the transition. They continue this approach when turning on new features.

  Another large-scale pharmaceutical client of Revvity Signals collected written feedback from scientists about impediments to using the solution to record experiments as they conducted them. Examples included prohibitions from bringing a laptop into the laboratory, poor Wi-Fi in a given location, or a business rule around how many days an experiment could be open, even though certain experiments take longer than that. Getting this information enabled the team to address and overcome these obstacles.

• Measure Adoption

  As these organizations migrated their teams to Signals Notebook, measuring adoption rates was important.

  Others clients have looked more in depth at the quality of the data their scientists are recording and how it maps to corporate goals. One of our clients, for example, connected experiment sign-off to an external function to check that critical features were included. They also taught users how to create a query and put it on their dashboards, to track compliance. The query shows how long a document has been waiting for sign off, thus encouraging users themselves to create the expectation that everyone use the system consistently.

  Another company took an approach where their team built a data pipeline that extracts data from Signals Notebook into external software for even more detailed analytics, on topics like how long users spend in a given part of the solution to pinpoint potential opportunities for workflow enhancement.
   

The Path to Streamlined ELN Adoption with Signals Notebook

The experiences of these leading organizations demonstrate that the key to streamlining adoption of Signals Notebook is tailoring your approach based on your company’s starting point. Clear communication, training adapted to end users’ roles and languages needs, and the right support structures all help ensure a smooth transition. Once scientists are on board, they can begin leveraging the data management capabilities of Signals Notebook, and the solution can become a catalyst for improved collaboration, data quality, and research efficiency.

Our cutting-edge ELN solution enables your R&D discoveries for seamless integration. To learn more, watch our demo or sign up for a free trial today. There’s a reason why over 1 million scientists prefer Signals Notebook to get more out of their data.

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