Revvity Signals Notebook

Revvity Signals Notebook is dedicated to the pharmaceutical industry, particularly for scientific support, drug discovery, and chemical-related experiments. It allows users to create templates for various experimental purposes and supports enterprise features like policy rules for different user types. As a system configuration engineer, I make these templates for different experimentation purposes for different sets of users. While we primarily use Signals Notebook, there are other products like VitroViewer for workflow execution with experimental data and Inventory for creating Lakehouse solutions. Our group usually uses Signals Notebook, though different teams might use Inventory or other products from the suite.

From my experience over the last fifteen months, the most valuable feature of the Revvity Signals Notebook is its ease of use. Customers appreciate that updating templates is straightforward and everything is automatically saved. The UI is simple, making, creating, sharing, and searching experiments easy. Different scientists can reference each other's experiments seamlessly. It is also swift compared to other vendor-built software, where you have to customize templates and write a lot of code. Revvity Signals Notebook excels in this aspect, making it smooth and efficient.

Revvity Signals Notebook supports compliance within the pharma industry. It meets GXP requirements and security policies, depending on how meticulously you design your environment. Signals Notebook provides audit trails and features for making changes and giving audit details.

The workflow implementation is a pain point for customers because it relies on Spotfire with added plugins, which are not natively integrated. This makes execution slow and less effective in meeting all scientific workflow needs. Additionally, the support service is slow to respond and resolve issues. Even known problems take time due to a lack of a Sstrong developer support team, making it a significant product drawback. They also need to work on other products like Workflow, which still need to achieve these compliance requirements. While Signals Notebook is good enough to meet all the necessary needs, other products like BitLocker still need improvements to become fully compliant enterprise products.

I have been using Revvity Signals Notebook for the past year and a half.

Revvity Signals Notebook is very stable because it was developed from scratch. Many users, almost a hundred thousand in our client environment, use this product, which is stable.

However, other products that are not natively designed and developed by Revvity are unstable. For example, implementing workflows requires a lot of effort from developers to solve minor issues because the product tends to crash. These non-native products are volatile compared to Signals Notebook.

It is a very scalable product.

If you want to use Revvity Signals Notebook for the first time, my advice depends on your purpose. If you need to create templates for scientists to conduct and share experiments and reference others' work, you can definitely use this product. However, if you require complex workflows, data transformations, or integration with your data systems for advanced analytics, Revvity doesn't offer a fully stable product for these needs yet. For such cases, you would need your developers to use Revvity's REST API to expose data to your data lake, which can be costly and resource-intensive. You'll need to evaluate the additional costs and resources required beyond Revvity's product. If you're a small user group needing basic experimentation features, Revvity Signals Notebook is suitable. However, consider the additional value and cost before proceeding for comprehensive use with complex workflows and data integration.

From an end user's perspective, Revvity Signals Notebook is easy to learn. It's tricky for a configuration engineer but not overly complicated. With skilled resources, the learning curve is around three to six months. Overall, it's not more challenging than other SaaS products, making it reasonably easy to use.

I would rate the solution a six out of ten. The reason is that their focus seems to be on just one set of products, neglecting other products. Even though big pharma clients have been consistently pushing and giving them ideas on improving, they don't seem to have enough capacity to address those ideas. Clients are eager for improvements, but Revvity needs to take their feedback seriously and address the issues quickly. They are on a good path but need to put in more effort. Our client has been using their products for more than two years, and if the environment isn't stabilized within that time, they need to rethink their approach. They need to be more dedicated to addressing client needs.