Study Project: Formulator and Steps

In previous Release Notes we provided an overview of our Study Project.

With this release, after defining your targets for a new Study, our new Formulator section will be active. In it, you can add multiple steps to your Study, reflecting how you would naturally divide work in the lab. Each step contains:

• A list of materials/ingredients used from all those defined in your historical database. The list also includes all previous steps or premixes from your current study as possible options. 
• Instructions - free text fields to document any instructions during formulating.
• Processing - a structured way of defining how some materials should be processed (e.g. mixed, baked, etc.), by specifying parameters and conditions.
• Testing - the ability to perform quick tests while formulating to check, for example, if the temperature or the viscosity of the formulation is within an acceptable range.

Improvements

• Deployed a scan and self-healing mechanism for Views. As you know, your records and data model can be  updated with configuration changes. Prior to pushing these changes to production, we can now run a scan of the data in every View and compare current values with the originals stored in your records. If deltas are detected, the mechanism will trigger a self-healing function to automatically rewrite the View’s data to match the valid original data.
• Improved performance by up to 2 seconds when updates to one record trigger a cascade of data changes in other records as can happen, for instance, when a material property is added or changed and that might impact hundreds or thousands of trail and final formulation records.
• Resolved an intermittent issue when cloned Records couldn’t be renamed.

Regular Pen Testing 

In order to maintain a high level of security and consistent with our ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II compliance obligations, we undergo annual software Penetration Testing, which is an authorized simulated attack performed on our software to evaluate its security. We are proud to say that this year’s Pen Test found just 2 minor unexploited vulnerabilities that we successfully addressed with:

• Sanitized formatting of values that are being copied from Alchemy and pasted to an application like Excel.
• Improved security when uploading files to Alchemy, explicitly preventing the upload of executable files.

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