By: Rahul Koul
Last updated : October 29, 2021 12:44 pm
Agilent is working towards designing and developing smart labs with features such as mass spectroscopy, chromatography and other technologies.
Vivek Dhyani of Agilent Technologies shares his insightful perspective on the future of analytical laboratories.
“Most of the time we listen to the customers about their requirements in the laboratories and that brings us the spark for innovation at Agilent Technologies. We do a lot of surveys and collect a lot of feedback from relevant industries across the globe. When we compiled the feedback from a recent survey, we saw that 58 percent were looking at efficiency in the lab, 52 percent were looking at making the teams more competent. Third thing that came of it was that 73 percent wanted to avoid the downtime, one of the biggest challenges as the lab should be continuously running and showing maximum productivity. In totality, the survey concluded that productivity should be higher, cost should be lesser and ultimately result in profitability and growth,” says Vivek Dhyani, GC/GCMS All India Business Manager, Agilent Technologies.
Dhyani shared his presentation titled, ‘Future of analytical labs - Smart and Intelligent Approach’ at the NextGen Chemicals & Petrochemicals Summit 2021 organized by Indian Chemical News on 7-8 October, 2021.
“The challenges that industry will continue to face in the future can be divided into two parts, demographic and economic ones. Demographic is part where we have resources such as operators who are highly experienced and difficult to replace after their retirement. Lab operators may not do the troubleshooting of the instrument they are using and operators might not use one instrument but multiple ones. Given the fact that maximizing productivity is the goal of every lab these days, it is highly relevant. Customers expect a lab that is smarter and connected to each other,” says Dhyani while explaining the expectations of the customers.
Sharing details about the technologies being developed by the company, Dhyani says, “We at Agilent are working towards designing and developing smart labs with features such as mass spectroscopy, chromatography and other technologies that come under a lab operation. We decided to design the instruments in such a way that they can do multiple processes in an automated way to save time and resources. The self-configured systems in the same pattern like smart phones where you download an app and do the configuration. Plug and play system where it gets ready to work the moment it is installed. Even for maintenance, the system should tell us it requires one. Self-diagnostic features that can help detect the issues and even address them remotely as well."
“We are developing smart instruments, InfinityLab HPLC Series which has got all these features such as remote connectivity, and does everything from sample preparation to injection. In Gas Chromatography, we have introduced Intelligent GC Systems with remote operations. We call them self-thinking systems, which are actually Artificial Intelligence based and these evolve on the basis of their use. It has got remote troubleshooting. All these smart features such as AI and IoMT will drive us into the future,” added Dhyani.