What is it?
Systems integration is the collecting of a number of pieces of equipment together and making a cohesive automation system with sample processing, sample tracking and data management.See Systems Integration...

If you have the equipment already (e.g. a plate reader), you may wish to just add a robot to automate the system. We can help you plan and deliver this system using OVERLORD laboratory automation control software. If you have the robot as well, we can just supply you with software. See Upgrades...

This is one of the key stages of an automation system, but often overlooked.

If you run 50 x 96-well microplates through a plate reader, that is nearly 5000 data points or spectra.

Many companies rely on labeling the plates by hand and hope that data is transcribed correctly when the plates are read. If you do the economics, if one plate is transcribed incorrectly and it cost £1,000/$2000 to produce, the whole stack is invalidated, the cost is £50,000/$100,000 and you don’t get to find out that there is a data problem until the data is used. The addition of barcodes to the plates and a simple reliable barcode reader guarantees data integrity. Barcoding...

Many companies get their data files from the system and manually review the data. This is time consuming and often unnecessary. Get the automation system to do the initial quality check and then show you the unusual answers only.

Once your data is collected, you may need to pass it on to another computer system, get the automation system or Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) to do it. See Data Handling & LIMS...