Traditional toxicology testing requires complex schedules that align task workflows with finite resources such as technician time and access to laboratories and equipment. Managing interdependent parts of the process manually with spreadsheets or other basic tools, while easily accessible, is inflexible, cumbersome, and prone to error and inefficiency . Automated platforms and workflow systems have the potential to optimize—or revolutionize—all aspects of drug development and testing to enhance speed, accuracy, and coordination.
The possible benefits and applications of workflow systems can feel overwhelming. Trying to achieve all at once can lead to paralysis and stymie efforts to upgrade systems. However, starting an AI transformation with a targeted approach can earn early wins and compound efficiencies. Here is a concise list of the top five impacts a focused implementation of automated scheduling can have on toxicology testing workflows.
Baseline Reality: Manual Processes Lead to Inefficiency
The entry point for digitizing most processes is to open a spreadsheet and begin logging activities. This approach is easily accessible, inexpensive, and understandable to most team members. However, spreadsheet-based scheduling requires manual data entry, which takes precious time and attention from laboratory staff. It also has the potential for simple errors like typos, oversights, or delays. Manual data entry can become a bottleneck in your process, and a lack of mechanisms within a spreadsheet to provide the appropriate security and validation can impact data integrity.
Toxicology scheduling processes are immensely complex and too nuanced to manage within a static spreadsheet. The answer to efficiency lies within the details. Automated tools can help gather and analyze the work you are already doing, providing prompts and insights that guide you to a better system on numerous fronts. Setting clear goals for introducing automation into your processes will make implementation more effective and getting buy-in from your team a lot easier.
Benefit 1: Real-Time Adjustments for Maximum Agility
Automated scheduling platforms such as WuXi AppTec’s proprietary intelligent platform, Pyxis, can generate—and then regenerate—schedules instantly. This helps the team adapt schedules, reorganize resources, and update task triggers automatically when unforeseen changes happen. Automated platforms’ capacity to respond to new study needs or unexpected delays helps teams be more adaptable under shifting operational conditions.
Benefit 2: Boosted Room Utilization & Technician Productivity
When schedules reflect real-time conditions, the resources needed to perform each task are more efficient. Pyxis improved efficiency in multiple workflows at WuXi AppTec, including an 18% room efficiency gain and a 23% increase in tasks completed. Real-time resource matching and automated updates eliminate downtime for teams, laboratory equipment, testing rooms, and other resources.
Benefit 3: Simplified Documentation & Data Integrity—and other Downstream Benefits
Automated systems can deliver tasks to handheld devices, allowing each technician to receive task notifications and triggers that apply specifically to them. They also enable concurrent documentation, capturing key details of every activity in real time. Automated platforms timestamp all entries, ensuring accuracy with no manual work, which leads to better, more complete data.
This type of simplified documentation has other downstream benefits beyond cutting down on errors and documentation time:
- Simplified documentation makes it easier to ensure compliance and ace regulatory audits.
- Aggregated operational data in one centralized platform makes for accurate, automated reporting.
- Better operational data uncovers anomalies and patterns that may require process improvement or additional training.
Benefit 4: Enhanced Cross-Department Collaboration
Automated platforms make collaboration across departments much easier by serving as a central scheduling hub for shared resources. Teams across QA, pathology, pharmacy, and toxicology can align on workflows and task statuses. As a result, teams experience fewer duplicate tasks and missed handoffs, and achieve a higher degree of collaboration, agility, and responsiveness to expected and unexpected operational demands.
Benefit 5: Improved Workforce Development & Satisfaction
Among all the operational benefits of systems that streamline workflows, communication, and access to data, a big one that bears mentioning is the positive impact on your workforce. More accurate and timely data helps teams manage workloads and guarantee humane schedules. With a more balanced workload and less friction around things like PTO planning, employees experience less burnout and more happiness and fulfillment in their work. On top of that, data can help support personnel development and advancement as well, using data to find opportunities for skill-matching, peer mentoring, and performance tracking.
Implementing an automated system may feel costly but losing staff and hiring and training new team members also come at a cost. The team at WuXi AppTec was an excellent example of the positive side of this trade-off when, after implementing their system, they exceeded a 95% retention rate in 2020.
Complementing—Not Replacing—Human Expertise
Leveraging automated systems to improve efficiency in testing workflows frees up technicians and scientists to do what they do best. The critical and intuition-reliant tasks that only humans can do—like process design, oversight, and decision-making—are absolutely required to ensure new technologies continue to work effectively, and toward the most strategic ends. Combining human insight and expertise with process efficiencies, drug testing laboratories can achieve the right balance to deliver the highest quality service.
Final Thoughts
Automated scheduling systems can be valuable efficiency drivers in toxicological testing workflows. Once organizations establish a platform that improves flexibility and enables accurate, real-time documentation and data collection, the sky is the limit for how it can be used to improve processes. For forward-looking sponsors and laboratory partners, embracing automated isn’t just an upgrade. It is a necessary step toward advancing drug development.
As a global company with operations across Asia, Europe, and North America, WuXi AppTec provides a broad portfolio of R&D and manufacturing services that enable the global pharmaceutical and life sciences industry to advance discoveries and deliver groundbreaking treatments to patients. Through its unique business models, WuXi AppTec’s integrated, end-to-end services include chemistry drug CRDMO (Contract Research, Development and Manufacturing Organization), biology discovery, preclinical testing and clinical research services, helping customers improve the productivity of advancing healthcare products through cost-effective and efficient solutions. WuXi AppTec received an AA ESG rating from MSCI for the fourth consecutive year in 2024 and its open-access platform is enabling around 6,000 customers from over 30 countries to improve the health of those in need – and to realize the vision that “every drug can be made and every disease can be treated.”
