Introducing PACe: Our New Digital Ecosystem

This is Lab Innovations, Exploring Technology and Analytical Instruments with PAC. We quickly patrol and analyze our company. One of the world's leading manufacturers of Lab and Process Analyzers. Hello everyone. I'm Jikari Harris, the host of Lab Innovations, Exploring Technology and Analytical Instruments with PAC. Today I have a very special guest with me. I have Hakkan Turan. He is PAC's product manager for our digital portfolio. Hakkan, how are you? Hello Jikari. I'm very happy to be here, so thank you. I'm good. How are you? I'm doing well. I've been looking forward to this episode and to talk to you about PAC's digital portfolio, so just looking forward to this conversation. Me too. I'm very excited about the PACE product. Talk about the PACE product. I'm very happy to be here. So thank you. Alright, well let's get into it. So now PACE has a wide variety of products that are in different categories. Since PACE is a new product for the company, which category does it belong in? PACE product is an IoT product, so an addition to our digital portfolio. It represents a digital ecosystem for our PAC instruments, a digital counterpart to our physical products if you want. It is designed as one platform to optimize the processes for our instruments. What kind of functions or features will this platform offer? We offer three key features of PACE. Belonging in the categories, asset management, instrument insights and predictive analytics and the platform of PACE will offer features and actions tailored on individual instruments. Can you tell us more about those key features? How will it impact the operations in the lab? Let's start with asset management. Absolutely. So asset management will provide details, visuals and statistics regarding instrument utilization throughout various globally distributed sites and will offer measures for lab efficiency in real time. For example, lab efficiency by comparing the utilization of assets, comparing the success rate of measurements and identifying critical assets due to high demand, an instant visibility and scale of all laboratory assets. Such a digital product supports seeing more details in one page and to navigate faster from information to information instead of using the small instrument panel. Now, instrument insights will second on the list. What can you tell us about this feature? What insights are we talking about? So the feature instrument insights will focus on condition monitoring of the assets. Such information has occuring errors, including the summary and the description of those errors. All of our root cause analysis and detailed work instructions, how to resolve the issue. All that to save crucial time to get the instrument and the work streams in the lab up and running again. This also includes the summary of error logs, automatically saved and evaluated without any additional user action necessary. So this means no manual entries anymore for the lab manager. The paste platform will also offer versatile reporting function. So if there is a need to discuss any instrument status or alarm in detail, you can directly reach out to your local distributor or the responsible PAC service engineer. This section of paste will allow in summary a health check of the instruments, which are not just related to errors, an information of the status score of the instrument at a glance regarding connection and performance. Lastly, you also mentioned predictive maintenance. So when I hear predictive maintenance, I'm imagining a notification to do maintenance. Am I right with that guess? Yes, absolutely. It also includes an notification function for service, maintenance and calibration of the instruments, but it goes way beyond such a function. The instrument analytics that we have integrated with in pace covers the future of such a digital product and it resembles also one of the most advanced key features of the ecosystem. We leverage our global knowledge and experience with service and engineering of the instrument and traditional measurement techniques and standards. We combine this knowledge in integrated analytics for an optimal care of the instruments, tailored on the actual usage and setup of the customer with the unit. The analytics in place will work with the individual instrument logs to analyze the need for service, maintenance or calibration or the change of single parts to guarantee an unbeatable uptime of the assets. This will ultimately lead to safe, significant costs, fully visible for the customer and optimize service and support from us or our channel partners. This is all good info. Can you tell us more about the installation procedure of the pace product? Yes, so pace is a cloud-based platform that we deploy through a cellular gateway. This gateway includes a SIM card and is configurated by PSC, tailored on a customer setup, so this means that we optimize it to the actual infrastructure in the lab, depending on whether instruments are placed. The cellular connection is an encrypted private line with an end-to-end security to our privately managed cloud. This is very important to guarantee our pace members the highest security measures available on the market, guaranteed by IT security certifications that we gladly provide and discuss. The cloud deployment helps us to avoid any complicated installation and will be accessible from everywhere at any time. Can you give us a final summary of pace? So the key facts of pace and what it stands for, reduce downtime of the instruments, reduce dependency on routine maintenance and service intervals, we will have automatic notification and history locks, lifespan optimization of individual parts and ultimately of the instruments and customer assets. And lastly, automated identification of the most frequent errors and alerts to provide the correct countermeasures to reach a maximum throughput in the lab. This all sounds great, Hakkan. I know pace will be a great new product for the industry. Thank you, Jekarri. It's a really great talking to you. Thanks for listening to the latest episode of Lab Innovations. Explore technology and analytical instruments podcast. To request a demo for more information, visit paclp.com.