Navigation Redesign

We have started work on a large initiative to make it faster and easier to use Alchemy to get your work done. The broad objectives are to:

• Clarify the relationships between Processes (e.g. New Product Development (NPD) could be a parent process and Lab Work a child process)
• Make it faster and easier to find data
• Make it obvious where you are in the application
• Make it faster and easier to navigate through the application
• Make general data exploration easier
• Enable access to data only shared in Views
• Make it easier to manage lots of Views in your My Views section

We are making these changes in an iterative way, and Navigation Redesign is just the first step of six. In this release, we redesigned the primary (blue) navigation. We want to keep the right side (the content area) as clean as possible, so that everyone can focus on their work. Specifically, the changes in this release include:

• Moved product search, the user menu and notifications to the top and bottom of the primary left navigation.
  

• Implemented a more modern, cleaner design for the main blue navigation.
• Improved the main blue navigation collapse – when you close the navigation, it will not disappear! Insead, it will display a narrow width with category icons always visible, so you have more space for your work and still be able to navigate through the application.
  

Study Project

The Study project, announced in the last Release Notes, is progressing further. This week, we added three more capabilities:

• Automatic calculation of Averages for each test parameter in any defined Test Method.
• More robust base set of properties for the Material record.
• Ability to add properties on the fly, automatically expanding your data model and metadata and propagating the addition(s) to all Material records for consistency. 

In a subsequent release, the Material record will become even more powerful when we introduce material availability, LOT numbers and batch tracking, types and sub-types of materials (and auto-filtering of displayed properties based on the type, e.g. solvents and pigments will not have the same properties) which will facilitate the recommendation of alternative materials.

Integration & Performance Projects

Finally, we released:

• A throttling mechanism for integrations, making all integrations more robust and resilient
• The API for filtering records got extended with new parameters which enable it to only pull deltas (records that were updated, when and by whom), which can be crucial, for instance, when updating your internal data warehouse.
• A performance improvement of up to 75% on complex records (i.e., massive formulation and test data tables)