The lab workflow
Everything in Archon is organized under a project. This page walks through each module in the order most labs actually touch them.
Projects
A project is the container for a piece of work — a study, an assay validation, a grant. Notebook entries, samples and protocol executions all belong to one. Who can see a project depends on your role: laboratory-wide staff (owner, admin, member) see every project by default, while a collaborator — someone added to a specific study only — sees just the projects they were invited into.
Electronic Lab Notebook
The ELN is organized as folders and entries, with a rich-text editor for entries. Two things are worth knowing before you start writing:
- Entries autosave as drafts. A draft stays fully editable — retitle it, move it, rewrite it — for as long as you need.
- Finalizing is one-way. When an entry is complete, finalizing it captures an electronic signature (your password, re-entered) and locks the content. A finalized entry cannot be edited or returned to draft — corrections after that point are made as a new, separate amendment, so the original stays visible. This is deliberate: it is the same behaviour ALCOA+ and 21 CFR Part 11 expect from a paper notebook, and it is what makes the audit trail mean something.
Every create, edit and finalization is written to a per-organization, tamper-evident hash chain — each entry cryptographically links to the one before it, so an alteration made even with direct database access is detectable. This runs on every tier, including the free one; it is not a paid feature.
Samples
The sample pipeline tracks a physical or digital sample through a configurable set of stages — intake, processing, QC, storage, whatever your workflow needs. Each stage can require its own data capture, and stage transitions can be gated on that data being complete. Samples support bulk import from CSV/Excel and keep a full chain-of-custody history.
Protocols
Protocols are reusable procedure templates — a SOP turned into something executable. Running a protocol against a sample creates a tracked execution: each step is recorded as it’s completed, and built-in calculators handle dilutions and master-mix scaling so the numbers in the record match what was actually pipetted.
Quality & accreditation
Archon assesses your laboratory against several frameworks — ISO/IEC 17025, 21 CFR Part 11, WHO/OECD GLP, ALCOA+ and others, depending on your licence tier — and the readiness score is derived from your live data, not a checklist someone fills in once. Whether instruments are actually in calibration, whether analysts hold current authorizations, whether the audit trail actually verifies: the dashboard reads the real records to answer each of those, and requirements that can only be attested by a person (rather than measured) are excluded from the score until someone attests them, so the percentage means something.
When an assessor arrives, evidence packs generate a complete, dated, hash-sealed document in one click — covering integrity, competency, calibration, controlled documents, nonconformities and clause-by-clause evidence.
Connecting Archon to other systems your lab already runs — a LIMS, an SSO server, an instrument — lets the same compliance sweep check them too. See the API reference for the write-side integration, or ask your administrator about Compliance → Connected Systems for the read-only monitoring side.
Roles, briefly
Laboratory standing (owner / admin / member / collaborator) controls what you can see and do across the lab. A collaborator belongs only through the specific study they were invited to — no visibility into stock, settings, the audit trail, or other studies. Within a study you separately hold a research role (lead / contributor / viewer); a lead can invite others into that one study by email.