Benchling Reporter

Our client was the Director of Informatics at a midsized, clinical-stage biopharmaceutical firm. The company had been around for about 8 years and had an established Informatics environment leveraging both BIOVIA’s Pipeline Pilot and Benchling’s ELN. The company has an internal ELN policy that requires ongoing project entries to be kept up-to-date and updated at least once a month, ensuring that all data is timely entered into the ELN. However, compliance with this policy was challenging to assess, due to the lack of a built-in Benchling feature for summarization and reporting across thousands of records.

One of the confounding challenges was the continuous evolution of the R&D organization structure that was not synchronized with ELN user records, as Benchling’s concept of “teams” was insufficient to configure up-to-date grouping of users into organizational functions. The Informatics team was tasked with developing a solution that would automate reporting of ELN compliance metrics to upper management on a regular basis, while leveraging existing tech stack for rapid implementation and cost-effective support.

Delivery

Our team created a modular solution using the Pipeline Pilot platform that accesses Benchling’s API to fetch relevant data, creates summary reports, and sends them to recipients. These reports are scheduled to be triggered monthly, sending reports to individual users about their lack of compliance, as well as organizational function heads about their team member’s individual performance. We developed several reusable components that can also be used for additional applications in the future, such as RESTful service requests manager with built-in data parsing, validation rules, and error handling, as well as messenger with dynamic templates for HTML formatted email with data tables and links to original ELN entries.

Value

Our solution enabled the client’s management team to meet their goals of effectively assessing and enforcing ELN policy compliance across the entire company. This assessment can now be rapidly completed in real-time or on a regular schedule, regardless of the number of Benchling entries and users, and is fully aligned with an up-to-date organizational structure. The management team is now able to automatically receive regular ELN compliance reports by email, while the owners and reviewers of Benchling entries have sufficient notice to complete their required updates on time.
By using the Pipeline Pilot environment and technology, the client has met the goal of keeping software development and maintenance costs low, while leveraging pre-existing infrastructure and paving the way towards other solutions with re-usable components. This project also demonstrates an effective technology augmentation strategy, whereas feature gaps in mission-critical commercial platforms such as Benchling can be closed rapidly by using custom software development.