2006 ALA Survey on Industrial Laboratory Automation

Abstract

This article reports the results of a survey examining the practice of laboratory automation in industrial laboratories. This survey polled 400 ALA industrially employed members and received 72 responses representing the R&D components of 37 different companies in Pharmaceutical, Biotech, and Agriculture Science sectors. The survey consisted of 14 questions. For purposes of this report, the survey results are broken into three sections: (1) How laboratory automation gets done; (2) Why automate—success and return on automation; and (3) Technical aspects of automation. Some of these same questions have been part of surveys conducted in the past among attendees of LabAutomation Conference short courses, and that historical data will be compared. (JALA 2007;12:239–46)