Alchemy Cloud
January 15, 2025
“We see AI as the clearest path to nimbly expand Novagard’s formulation capabilities to meet our growing demand for innovative products. So we went looking for a fast path to ramp up our use of AI. We needed a solution that offered the ability to create software workflows that mirror our lab activity, and a provider that understood formulations. We want to stop doing lots of ladder studies and one-factor-at-a-time testing. Instead, we'd like to use statistics and AI to run more efficient experimentation and optimize formulation performance, so we needed an integrated ELN and LIMS. In our vendor assessment, we asked ourselves: what is the quickest path to achieve our holistic vision? The answer was Alchemy.” - Robert Pafford, Vice President Research & Development, Novagard
Novagard is a leading innovator and manufacturer of silicone sealants, coatings, lubricants, and PVC foams for the electronics, transportation, manufacturing, industrial, building systems, medical, aerospace, energy, and military markets.
With the electrification and miniaturization of everything, Novagard saw the broader role silicones could play in innovative and sustainable manufacturing. Companies are looking for world-class protection of their critical components. Silicones, with their superior stability, durability, and flexibility across broad temperature ranges, provide excellent protection for electronics in a wide variety of end-use applications.
As Novagard expands into new markets, so has its product portfolio. Digitalization and automation are top corporate priorities to meet and exceed their customers’ needs and expectations. AI is foundational to Novagard’s ability to maintain its leadership in critical silicone technologies by reducing unnecessary testing and leveraging its growing body of technical data.
Novagard needed an integrated ELN + LIMS for its research and product development functions. Given their requirement for rapid formulation optimization, the software selected must generate AI-ready data, have sophisticated search to be able to identify the best starting formulations from their historical body of work, and be able to run AI to recommend formulations that would achieve desired technical and functional targets.
Beyond software requirements, Novagard was operating on a very tight time frame. It sought a system that could be stood up quickly with a wide variety of out of the box features and the ability to be tailored to some very specific Novagard needs. During the product evaluation, Novagard expected to see digital replicas of its R&D workflows, stage gate process, 2K formulations, test methods, analyses, and reporting. They assessed how quickly vendors could address their needs during a sandbox evaluation period and whether the vendors had the means to make subsequent workflow changes via configuration because the company’s digitalization and operating needs will evolve over time.
They also needed a system that could facilitate compliance with rigorous third party standards, so actions needed to be granularly attributed to specific users, time stamped, and auditable.
After a vendor screening process, Alchemy was selected to provide its integrated ELN + LIMS with the express intent of rolling out AI as soon as the ELN + LIMS were stood up.
Alchemy deployed its software using a predefined methodology and executed the roll out to plan. This was important to executive leadership as their strategic plan for the year included fully digitalizing their R&D workflows, generating AI-ready data, and rolling out AI by year end.
The scope of deployment included ingestion of raw materials, product database, and associated technical data. Configuration included critical and unique Novagard R&D workflow elements that supported their stage gate process. Since they needed the ability to formulate in a variety of ways interchangeably, we had to digitally capture their 1K and 2K formulations in such a way that optimization could be done at both the component and full formulation levels.
The result was a tailored digital R&D platform that meets robust security requirements for companies selling products to U.S. government agencies and in highly regulated industries. Alchemy delivers algorithmic search and ranked retrieval of prior formulations based on any combination of properties captured in the system as well as practical formulating constraints to quickly identify the best starting formulations for new project work, and AI-ready data pipelines for formulation recommendations. The initial project was completed in approximately 3 months including staff training.
“The deployment team did very well. They were extremely responsive and understood our formulation types and underlying science. They easily set up the ELN to capture our 1K and 2K formulations. Whatever we threw at them, they listened, and always came back with options and associated outcomes. Despite our timeline and specific configuration needs, launching Alchemy was very straightforward.” - Robert Pafford, Vice President Research & Development, Novagard
