Materials Prep vs. paper and shared drives.
Spiral notebooks at the bench. Recipes in Word docs on someone's laptop. Micrographs piled into folders nobody can search. Most metallography labs are running this stack today. Here's what changes when a sample-first ELN replaces it, and where paper still wins.
The system every lab actually has.
Hardness readings in a spiral notebook. Polishing recipes in a Word doc the senior technician keeps on her laptop. Micrographs in a dated folder on a network drive, filenames like img_4421.tif. The system works, until the technician leaves, the laptop dies, the folder structure changes, or someone asks for traceability.
Materials Prep replaces this stack with one searchable journal. The trade-off is honest: you give up the zero-friction of a pen on a notebook page; you get back search, multi-user, audit, and continuity.
Honest accounting: paper journals are reliable, cheap, already-paid-for, and don't need an internet connection. The columns where paper wins are real.
Four reasons the spiral notebook stops scaling.
More than one person preps samples in your lab
Paper journals don't merge. Two technicians working different shifts on the same study end up with two parallel notebooks and a third document trying to reconcile them. A shared journal removes the reconciliation step.
You're losing recipes when people leave
Senior technicians retire, grad students graduate, methods leave with them. A lab recipe book is institutional memory written down once and indexed by what the next person actually searches for.
Folder dives are eating your day
If finding the right micrograph means scrolling through dated folders or asking the person who took it, the cost shows up in time, not in a line item. The atlas is built so the second person who looks for that image finds it.
An auditor or customer is going to ask for traceability
ISO 17025, AS9100, NADCAP, and most internal QA processes want a defensible record of who logged what when. The audit log is built for that conversation.
Three honest reasons paper might still be right.
Your lab is one technician and you trust your filing system
If one person owns every sample from receiving through report, and they have a system that works, paper is genuinely fine. Software is most useful when more than one set of hands touches a sample.
You don't have reliable internet at the bench
Materials Prep is a web app. If your lab is in a basement, a fab, or a remote site without dependable connectivity, paper still wins until that's fixed. We don't have an offline mode.
You're under FDA 21 CFR Part 11 strict scope
Materials Prep is suitable for ISO 17025 traceability and AS9100 process audits, but is not 21 CFR Part 11 strict today. If your records have to satisfy FDA, validate carefully before switching.
Common questions about moving off paper.
- How long does it take to get started?
- Sign up, create your lab, invite your team, and you can log a sample at the bench the same day. A clean account ships empty on purpose, so there's no demo data to sort through. Recipes and atlas references grow as the lab uses them.
- Do we have to enter our existing recipes by hand?
- Mostly. You can paste recipe text into a recipe form and the structured fields fill in straightforwardly. If you have a Word doc per recipe, the import is one-by-one for now; if you have something more structured (a spreadsheet, a vendor export), email pace@metallographic.com and we'll see what we can do.
- What about the micrographs already in our shared drive?
- Bulk image import isn't a one-click flow yet. The pragmatic approach: don't try to backfill a thousand old images. Start logging new samples through Materials Prep, and pull older micrographs into the atlas only when one becomes a reference image worth keeping. The atlas is more useful as a curated reference than an everything-bucket.
- Can technicians log steps from a phone or tablet at the bench?
- Yes. The app is mobile-friendly and most prep journal entries are designed to be entered with a thumb, with the phone camera handling photo capture for journal entries and atlas additions.
- What happens to our data if we stop paying?
- Your data is yours. On request we'll export your lab's samples, prep work, recipes, etchants, atlas entries, and studies in a machine-readable format along with the original images. Self-serve export is on the roadmap. Full detail is on our trust page.
- Can paper still live alongside this?
- Some labs run a hybrid for the first few months: paper at the bench, end-of-shift transcription into Materials Prep. It's not the long-term endpoint, but it's a softer transition than going cold turkey, especially for senior technicians who built habits around a notebook.