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Researchers Adopting ELN
Some of the first users are researchers Kassy Pelzel and Steve Sealschott of P&G's household products group and Dave Maltbie, who does basic research related to baby care products. They say they are seeing benefits from the system but aren't using it for all their work yet.
Maltbie became an early volunteer for the ELN pilot projects because his work requires him to drive between several research facilities in the Cincinnati area to access different analytical instruments. His research mostly revolves around finding materials that would do a better job of absorbing fluids, which in turn should lead to better diapers among other products. He found himself lugging around multiple bulky paper notebooks. "It does get really irritating after a year or more," he says. "The chances of dropping a notebook and having it blow up, scattering good old three-ring notebook pages all over the place, get to be pretty good."
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With an electronic notebook, he could simply sign onto a computer at each site he visited and record his findings. At first, he still had to print out his notebook entries periodically and run around to different sites gathering counter signatures to document his work. So he sees much more of a benefit from the system since the introduction of electronic signatures.
On the other hand, if he hadn't had the motivation of wanting to simplify his trips between multiple research sites, "I'm not sure I would have been all that inspired" to try the system, Maltbie says. "In my section, I think I'm the only one using the electronic notebook. It's a bit of a pain. Especially the electronic signature thing, there are quite a few steps and keys and codes. To tell someone 'go add this to your list and learn this new system' is just about guaranteed to send somebody screaming into corridor in corporate America these days."
Of course, an electronic signature authentication process needs to be "a little difficult" to be secure, Maltbie says, "but it's just one more barrier when you're talking about getting thousands of people to use something."
Maltbie doesn't necessarily see being able to find records of previous research as a major benefit of the system to the extent that he would "much rather look at someone's summary of the topic" than the raw notes. "The main thing I see is convenience," he says. "The whole thing of carrying on a bunch of experiments at once doesn't work well on paper."
Pelzel and Sealschott point to a different payoff. "Steve and I are co-authors of a couple of notebooks," Pelzel says, and that's much easier in an electronic system than if they had to share a paper binder. And working with remote collaborators, such as chemists at P&G facilities in China, also becomes much simpler "because this way there's a centralized notebook that everyone dumps into."
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Sealschott also appreciates the fact that, with the addition of a little Visual Basic scripting, they've been able to automate the output of some of their analytical instruments directly into the notebook system. "So there's no more manual cutting and pasting. Without the ELN, all that data would have to go into a loose-leaf notebook—and we're talking hundreds of pages per week," he says.
Still, so far Pelzel and Sealschott are only using the system for one of several projects they are working on. "Sometimes it's easier for me to use a paper notebook, still," Sealschott says. The project he and Pelzel are collaborating on happens to involve a lot of standardized testing procedures that fit neatly into the ELN, he says. "For stuff that's not so routine, I'm not sure I'd put it into an ELN or not at this point," he says. Over time, the researchers will probably develop templates to make it easier to add a wider variety of data, he says, but right now "it's a big change and it's hard to get used to doing stuff that way."
For now, P&G is letting researchers adopt the system at their own pace, but eventually it will need to become mandatory to deliver the expected benefits, Caserta says. "With most systems I've been involved in, if you have 800 potential users out there, and 750 of them wind up being active users, you'd consider that pretty good. But with this notebook system, we need to have 100% participation—because we're going to shut down paper. We must drive 100% adoption across thousands of people, and that's a big challenge."
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