– PRESS RELEASE –

Paperless Lab Academy (PLA), Europe’s leading laboratory automation event, brings partners and attendees together in an environment designed to promote mutual interaction and exchange of views during plenary sessions and topic-focused workshops.

The fifth edition of the two-day event, organized by Industrial Lab Automation and NL42 Consulting took place from 4 to 5 April 2017 in Barcelona (Spain) under the theme of 2020 Roadmap for digital convergence. The aim of this edition was finding effective ways to transform scientific information into actionable insight.

The founder of the event, Peter Boogaard, CEO of Industrial Lab Automation, explained: ‘Over the past four years, the PLA has been raising awareness of “what works and what doesn’t”. At PLA2017, we’ll be investigating a roadmap for the next decade, and how the convergence of paper and digital is bringing a new dimension to laboratory informatics. The extensive use of data analytics and applying lessons learnt from other industries, such as adopting an Industry 4.0 mind-set, will accelerate and make easer the badly needed integration of scientific equipment with enterprise software, to ensure a cost effective and high quality contribution from the laboratory to the enterprise as a whole.’

One of the aims of the new owners of the event, the founders of NL42 Consulting Isabel Muñoz-Willery and Roberto Castelnovo is preserving the unique concept of this annual conference.

Isabel said: ‘Under the new management, Peter will continue to play an important role as a member of the scientific committee.’ Roberto added: ‘We believe in the successful formula of the PLA which is based on three pillars: content-rich, non-commercial sessions; a showcase of informatics tools and methodologies available today, through interactive workshops hosted by leading suppliers; and free access to all industry delegates.’

The PLA takes place annually and is aimed at directors and managers of research and development, IT and quality departments in pharmaceutical, cosmetic, biotechnological, petro-chemical and chemical markets.

The event is focused on building the ideal learning platform for all organizations involved in running laboratories, and in consolidating, integrating or simplifying the data they generate.

The 2017 edition was a success both for attendees and sponsors.

The 3 keynotes included the following topics:

“Transforming Lab Data into Real-Time Actionable Intelligence” by Northwest Analytics’ Chief Technical Officer Louis Halvorsen

“Exploring the Digital Potential for the Laboratory of the Future” by Gartner’s Research Vice President Analyst Michael Shanler 

“IoLT and information governance: Understanding and attacking the business, technical and legal issues” by Sofia van der Meulen from Axon Lawyers.

20 workshops were held during the event showcasing different industry lab informatics solutions. Some of the topics discussed during the sessions were: data integrity, data integration & instrument connections, flawless data interfaces, efficiency drivers of quality control laboratories, ELN (Electronic Lab Notebooks), LIMS, and data strategy, data governance, version control, open source software for research data on academia.  Last but not least, the key major concept , already introduced  at the PLA2016 edition, the Internet Lab of Things ( IoLT) has been strongly developed by Gartner, Astrix and Cubuslab together with the Industrial Internet of Things ( IIoT) confirming there are both two converging ecosystems.

More detailed information on the program deployed and post-event articles available at www.paperlesslabacademy.com

As of today, several post articles are being published by our media partners and will be added here:

From our Premium Media Partner, Scientific Commuting World:  first in series “Predicting the future of the laboratory”

Madrid, Spain, e Moordrecht, The Netherlands, 07/02/2017