The Most Hated Task in the Chemistry Lab (And How I Automated It With AI)

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Today I want to write a few lines in a slightly different way than usual.

I felt the need to write this article to share with you what has been my professional world for twenty years, one of its most common pain points, and to show you a solution I built — in my opinion simple yet effective.

Within this article you will find references to a product of mine that I hope will one day become a commercial reality, but which for now is simply a creature I want to show you before it has fully seen the light. For the sake of transparency, I want to underline that you will find references exclusively to my own creation.

🤔 The problem: ineffective tools for important tasks

How many times have you found yourself facing a task in your daily work, knowing in advance that you would waste precious time on cumbersome, poorly functioning processes that barely fit into your routine?

I believe each of us, in our daily lives, has at least two or three activities we dread — not so much because we don’t recognise their importance, but because the tools available are ineffective, poorly calibrated for the problem, and often unnecessarily complex.

How many times, while reluctantly tackling that task, have we thought: “Why do I have to go through all these steps to complete something that, with the right tools, I could finish stress-free and calmly in a tenth of the time?”

🧪 My background: twenty years between labs and bottlenecks

Well, today I want to tell you about my experience, rooted in my background as a chemist with fairly extensive knowledge of the laboratory world and its processes — and, unfortunately, of its most common bottlenecks and pain points, especially in small to medium-sized labs.

One of the issues I have consistently encountered throughout my entire career has been the correct and streamlined management of CRMs (Certified Reference Materials): those certified standard solutions from properly qualified suppliers, used to calibrate laboratory instruments and perform analyses, ensuring the traceability of analytical results to an international reference system.

📋 What makes CRM management so complex

Anyone in this field knows perfectly well that this is far from simple warehouse management — inventory, stock in and out, delivery documents, and the occasional invoice. And yet the tools most commonly used to keep CRMs under control are designed precisely for those classic warehouse management tasks, going no further than tracking quantities, expiry dates, batch management, and, at best, supplier management.

These tools are almost always present in organisations, but they are generic and forcibly adapted to the specific needs of CRMs. What they leave uncovered — and those who work in this field know it well — is the management of all the other peculiar characteristics of these products, whose flawless handling is one of the key pillars and critical challenges in laboratory operations.

CRMs must be accompanied by documentation certifying a whole range of characteristics:

• The declared analyte concentration must be accurately determined using suitable methods
• The measurement uncertainty associated with that value must be reported (e.g. 1000 ± 15 mg/l)
• The production lot
• The expiry date for both unopened and, where applicable, opened product
• The correct storage conditions (refrigerated, at room temperature, etc.)
• The identifiers of the starting materials from which the CRM was prepared
• Evidence from homogeneity studies of the product

Manufacturers of these materials must also operate, with respect to the production of the specific material, in compliance with the international standard ISO 17034.

As can be seen, this goes well beyond simple warehouse management. On top of this, there are a number of internal laboratory requirements related to CRM use, which demand careful comparison with what is stated in the Certificates of Analysis:

• Maximum accepted measurement uncertainty
• Storage conditions and designated storage location within the laboratory
• Registers to track in-house preparations from these CRMs (opening date, all dates of use, purpose of preparation, identifier of the person preparing it, validity and expiry of in-house solutions prepared, etc.)
• Declaration of conformity of the material for the purposes for which it is used within the facility, issued by whoever carries out incoming inspections

Correctly registering and accepting a CRM is a time-consuming operation that requires considerable attention from operators. The same applies to monitoring the process throughout the material’s entire lifecycle, through to disposal. Transcription errors, mistakes in storage conditions, inadvertent expiry date overruns, and traceability issues with CRM usage are everyday occurrences when not managed intelligently.

💡 The idea: a tool genuinely designed for CRMs

It was precisely for this reason that, almost as a personal challenge, I envisioned a tool to digitalise and speed up all those aspects that go beyond simple warehouse management. A tool that could autonomously read CRM documentation, compare it against the laboratory’s desired requirements, and assess its compliance.

As I was imagining it, I tried to retrace all those steps that, over the years, gave me a “knot in the stomach” whenever I had to handle a large batch of incoming CRMs — with the consequent loss of time and considerable risk of error — in order to automate them as much as possible.

And that is how my SaaS CRMVerifAI came to life — currently in beta, but already a fully working tool.

CRMVerifAI Login page

Developed entirely using the Antigravity IDE and using Supabase as database, CRMVerifAI is a SaaS platform designed to support the operational management of Certified Reference Materials within the laboratory. The tool was built with the goal of significantly reducing manual work, improving traceability, and meeting regulatory requirements.

The system covers the entire lifecycle of materials: from initial acceptance and validation, through to use in preparations and expiry management, All powered by an AI agent that performs research and runs queries using natural language input.

AI Agent

🔍 Data entry and acquisition

One of the main pain points in CRM management is the manual data entry of Certificate of Analysis (CoA) data. CRMVerifAI introduces a Smart Scan Engine that automatically extracts the key information from documents, through:

• Direct document upload
• QR code scanning via camera
• Reading the manufacturer’s barcode

CoA acquisition/scan screen

All extracted data can of course be verified, edited, and corrected by the operator before validation, thereby maintaining human oversight of the process.

✅ Acceptance criteria and validation

After entry, materials can be submitted for validation based on predefined and configurable criteria:

• Maximum acceptable measurement uncertainty
• Storage conditions
• Compliance with internal or regulatory requirements

MRC details screenshot 1

The system flags any inconsistencies or out-of-specification parameters, helping to catch issues before the material is used in analyses. The operator can decide to validate, reject, or keep the CRM on draft pending further information, for example from the supplier.

MRC details screenshot 2

MRC details screenshot 3

🗂️ Traceability and audit trail

Every operation is recorded in an audit log: creation, modification, validation. The log clearly highlights the changes made, showing both the state before and after each modification.

Audit Trail/operation History

This makes it possible to clearly reconstruct who did what and when — essential for both internal reviews and external audits, and for ensuring the integrity of the system.

Audit Trail Details

The audit trail logs for a specific organisation are visible only to that organisation’s admins. The platform owner can access the audit trails of all organisations.

🗃️ CRM archive

The archive works as a real-time updated inventory, viewable on the tool’s dashboard. Search filters and displayed fields can be customised.

Material list/inventory screenshot 1

Material list/inventory screenshot 1

Quick filters and views are available to identify, for example, materials approaching expiry or not yet validated.

⚙️ Configurable acceptance criteria

The SaaS includes a dedicated section where the following can be configured:

• CRM suppliers
• Analytical categories of a CRM (e.g. ICP-MS, GC-MS, etc.)
• The acceptance criteria desired by the laboratory

These criteria are specific to each analytical category and supplier: for each one, it is possible to define a specific maximum uncertainty value and storage conditions. In this way, when the tool automatically extracts data from a CRM, it compares it directly against the correct acceptance criterion.

Criteria Management — Screenshot 1

Criteria Management — Screenshot 2

🧫 Preparations register

The preparations module allows tracking of the relationship between primary materials and solutions prepared from those materials for a specific analytical method.

Preparation Registry

Each preparation maintains its link to the source material, together with:

• Preparation date
• Purpose of the preparation
• Name of the person who prepared it
• Other information relevant to traceability

Preparations are organised by analytical methods.

👥 Multi-user structure

The platform is organised by roles (operator, validator, administrator) and can be used across multiple organisations (laboratories or sites).

User/role management

Each user can see and modify only what is consistent with their authorisation level. Each organisation has at least one user with admin rights, who can:

• Invite other users from the same organisation via email, defining their role in advance
• “Freeze” a user

The SaaS owner has the ability to invite an organisation’s admin via email and to “freeze” an entire organisation.

📁 Document management

CRMVerifAI includes a centralised space for viewing documents (operating manuals, various instructions) and news. The space is accessible to all users, but its management and updates are the responsibility of the owner.

Document Hub

📈 Operational considerations

I am firmly convinced that adopting a tool of this kind has a decisive impact above all on:

• Reduction of transcription errors
• Faster CRM acceptance processes (especially when handling large volumes)
• Greater uniformity in acceptance criteria
• Immediate availability of documentation for audits
• Better control over expiry dates and material status

🏁 Conclusions

For once I felt a strong urge to share a personal experience that led me to build an application to optimise the work in a chemistry laboratory. Honestly, I often wished I had had a tool like this — lean and different from the large software houses’ LIMS, which tended to take a generalist approach to Reference Material management.

The tool is still being optimised, but I am planning to wrap up testing shortly and make it available as a beta release to a few laboratories, possibly even free of charge for a period of time.

In the meantime, I will soon be publishing a more detailed video on my YouTube channel, showing the actual use of this product and its potential. When I do, it will of course be announced accordingly.

I am genuinely open to any thoughts, comments, suggestions for improvement, or criticism you may have.

I would also be very happy if anyone could point me towards any groups, forums, companies, or potential users who might be interested in my work and to whom I could present it!