One operating layer across the whole lab.
Samples in one system, instruments in another, freezers on a controller nobody logs into, robots behind a vendor console, and the animal facility on a clipboard. Every part of the lab is instrumented and none of it is connected. CMS Life Sciences is the layer that spans them — governed, auditable, and the same underneath whichever part you start with.
Nobody integrates across the islands.
Each vendor solves its own square of the lab well and stops precisely at its own edge. Lab automation does not talk to sample management; sample management does not talk to the freezer; the freezer does not talk to the study the samples belong to. The integration work falls to the lab, which does it in spreadsheets, shared drives, and scheduled scripts that nobody governs and no auditor can read.
- Each system is an island with its own login, its own export, and its own version of the truth
- The connective tissue is manual, undocumented, and invisible to QA
- An excursion, a stalled run, or a missing sample is noticed by a person, late
- Every new instrument or robot adds another island rather than another data source
Six parts of the lab, one platform underneath.
These are not six products. They are six views of one governed data layer, which is why an event in any of them can trigger, gate, or explain something in another.
Sample management
Manifest intake, guided reception, barcode scanning, tracking, distribution, reconciliation, and end-of-study disposition — the shipped core.
Learn moreBiobanking
Consent-gated discovery over the annotated library, plus bulk accessioning, freezer hierarchy, relocation, and capacity planning at biobank scale.
Learn moreLIMS & instruments
Connect the LIMS and ELN you already run, aggregate instrument and device output, and map any vendor layout as configuration rather than code.
Learn moreRobotics & automation
Robotic arms in freezers, liquid handlers, per-station automation. Each vendor ships an island and nobody integrates across them — which is exactly the shape of problem the platform's node model exists for.
In-lab & environmental monitoring
Continuous sensing across the physical lab — temperature and cold chain, room and facility conditions, and welfare monitoring in animal facilities. In active development.
Study & workflow design
Study architects define the path a sample actually takes — spin, aliquot, treat, assay, store — and the operational surface follows the design instead of being rebuilt around it. Partly shipped through study configuration; the full workflow designer is roadmap.
The lab is a physical place, and it is already telling you things.
Sensor connectivity is where lab operations stops being a records problem and starts being a real-time one. The same connection and streaming model that carries instrument output carries environmental and welfare telemetry — which means an excursion is an event in the sample's own history, not an entry in a separate log that someone reconciles later.
Cold chain & storage conditions
Continuous freezer, fridge, and shipper temperature against the samples actually inside them, so an excursion resolves to an affected sample list rather than a unit ID.
Welfare & activity monitoring
Cage- and rack-level sensing in animal facilities — movement, drinking, and activity change — so a deviation surfaces as an alert during the night rather than an observation at the morning round.
Room & facility conditions
Ambient temperature, humidity, differential pressure, and door events across rooms and suites, held to the same audit standard as any other record.
Hardware-agnostic by design
Sensors and cage hardware come from whoever makes the best of them. The platform is the data and governance layer over that hardware — which is precisely the gap the sensor vendors themselves do not want to fill.
In-lab and environmental monitoring is in active development, not shipped. It is on this page because it is being built now and because it is the clearest illustration of what the platform is for — not because you can buy it today.
From a record you query to an operation you watch.
Records tell you what happened. Lab operations needs to know what is happening — and the platform's hot tier is the difference between the two.
- Live streams from device and system activity with no polling on your side
- A change feed that fires whenever the workspace configuration itself changes
- Warm queries over data still in motion, so a threshold is checked as it is crossed
- Every alert and acknowledgement recorded as an attributable, timestamped event
What every platform capability does for lab operations.
CMS Life Sciences is built on Open Industrial, a platform built for exactly this class of problem in industrial operations. Here is its entire published capability set, with what each one is for when the operation being run is a lab.
Workspaces & provisioning
AvailableA governed workspace provisioned on sign-up — no installation, no server build — with your team invited into it under their own roles.
Read the docsOne workspace spans samples, instruments, freezers, robots, and rooms, instead of one system per island each with its own login and its own version of the truth. Provisioned at sign-up, with your team invited into it under their own roles.
Deployment options
AvailableEvaluation, Fully-Managed, or Bring-Your-Own-Cloud — three tiers with an identical compliance, audit, and access model.
Read the docsFacility and welfare telemetry is some of the most sensitive data a lab holds. Run in your own cloud tenant and it never leaves infrastructure you control — with the same audit trail, access model, and compliance behaviour as the managed tier.
Granularity of control
AvailableDrafts, commits, undo/redo, proposals, and forks — configuration is versioned like a document, so nothing is permanent until someone says so.
Read the docsA new alert threshold, a rebalanced robot schedule, a changed escalation path — drafted, reviewed, committed, and reversible. Operational change stops being a deployment and becomes something a lab manager can make and a QA reviewer can read.
API & connection nodes
AvailableTwo integration patterns: an API node that polls a system on a schedule, or a Connection node that receives events as they happen.
Read the docsThe freezer, the incubator, the cage rack, the robotic arm, the LIMS, and the badge reader all attach through the same two node types — polled or pushed. OPC UA and SCADA, which most lab automation and building systems speak natively, are roadmap; today those systems connect through their REST, file, or broker interfaces.
Cold, warm & hot data
AvailableDownload the history, query what is flowing now, or subscribe to a live stream and a configuration change feed.
Read the docsCold gives you a year of temperature history for an excursion investigation. Warm answers which units are drifting right now. Hot pushes a live feed to the operations screen, and a change feed fires whenever the workspace configuration itself changes.
Custom nodes & extensibility
In progressA pluggable node model behind every connection, query, and dashboard. First-party node types today; customer self-service authoring is roadmap.
Read the docsRobotics and instrument vendors ship islands, and a new node type is how an unintegrated arm, reader, or cage sensor becomes a first-class participant in the same flow as everything else. Built by our team on the shipped node model today; self-service authoring is roadmap.
Azi, the AI operator
AvailableA workspace-aware assistant with context on your real connections and flows. It drafts proposals for review and never mutates anything directly.
Read the docsAsk which freezers drifted last night, which robot runs stalled, or which racks stopped reporting — and get an answer grounded in your actual workspace. Azi drafts new monitors, queries, and dashboards as proposals for a person to approve.
MCP server
AvailableAny MCP-native model can read, query, and propose. There is no accept tool — proposals only ever land through a person in the workspace UI.
Read the docsAny MCP-native model can read the lab's live state, run queries across it, and propose new monitoring, but cannot enact anything. The absence of an accept tool is the architecture, not a policy — which is what makes agents usable in a regulated facility at all.
Roles & access administration
AvailableNamed access rights, bundled into custom configurations, assigned to people — with Viewer/Editor/Admin as the starting default, not the ceiling.
Read the docsA vivarium technician, a facilities engineer, a study director, and an external auditor each need a different lab. Named access rights bundled into custom configurations give each of them exactly their own, and every assignment is itself audited.
Audit trail & data integrity
AvailableEvery governed mutation produces its own compliance evidence structurally — attributable, timestamped, append-only, and mapped to an ALCOA+ principle.
Read the docsThe audit machinery is already load-bearing for sample custody: attributable, timestamped, append-only, each event tagged with the ALCOA+ principle it satisfies. Monitoring is being built onto that same spine, so an excursion and its acknowledgement become evidence rather than a side channel — by design, not yet in production.
System upgrades
RoadmapThe planned linked-environment model — promote a change from testing through staging into production on your own change-control steps.
Read the docsPlanned: promote a monitoring configuration or workflow change from a testing environment through staging into production on your own change-control steps — so a change to a facility's alerting is as controlled as a change to a study.
Validation data & custom reporting
RoadmapAudit-trail export today, with broader validation-data downloads and custom compliance reporting planned.
Read the docsAudit-trail export is live today. Broader validation-data downloads and custom compliance reports and dashboards over operational and environmental data are planned.
What is built, and what is not.
The same honest ledger published across the site, filtered to this area. The full matrix lives on the Sample Management page.
- In-lab environmental & welfare monitoringIn progress
in active development as its own build, alongside the sample app rather than inside it
- Robotics & lab-automation integrationRoadmap
- Study workflow designerRoadmap
- Real-time operations view over live device streamsRoadmap
- Cross-domain alerting (excursion to affected samples)Roadmap
Connect the lab you actually have.
Bring us the islands — the LIMS, the freezers, the robots, the sensors, the spreadsheet holding it together — and we will show you the layer that spans them.