CORE FEATURES

RESOURCE BOOKING

Comprehensive and Intuitive Scheduler

Agendo offers a comprehensive resource scheduling with intuitive interface and color-coded booking status. It includes waiting lists, booking reminders and real-time usage tracking with automatic booking confirmations. All features can be configurated by the managers - anything you need to best fit your workflows, Agendo finds a way for you to do it. If not, contact us and we will find a way to make it happen!

Several Booking Options

Whether you'd like to have real usage tracking, admin booking confirmation or regular booking, Agendo provides you with the tools you need. Furthermore, entries can be transferred, released, deleted, subscribed or with waiting lists, so that no intervention from managers is required.

Easy and Simple to Use

Make a booking with two clicks: just by drag and drop the schedule at your choosing. You can do it either in a desktop or in a touch interface. Calendars can be grouped functionally-wise, so that alternative resources' availability are easily reached.

Optimize Resource Usage

When set with real usage tracking, watch in the calendar booking and usage mismatch. Using this strategy, you drastically decrease usage without booking during weekends and post working hours, avoiding equipment misusage and increasing revenues.

Collecting Metadata

Configure booking metadata with relevant information for users to reproduce their experiments. You can also link a Note or SOP to your booking slot. Together with our data management, it provides a powerful mechanism to keep your data organised.

PRODUCTS & SERVICES

Traceable and Configurable Requests

With Agendo you can order consumables and services using our intuitive interface. Spend less time and effort keeping track of your facility or laboratory orders using our comprehensive workflow to manage requisitions. Create and manage the inventory of your products, storage and hazards. All features can be configurated by the managers. Either to display or hide options, to edit or share requests with other users - anything you need to meet your demands, Agendo finds a way for you to do it.
If not, contact us and we will find a way to make it happen!

Keep Your Services Organised

Configure request forms at your leisure and intuitively organise your tasks. Whether it is to ask for consumables or request more complex services for your experiments, there is always a solution for you. The tasks can also be linked, which can have a functional role - such as for biosafety assessments, ethics assessments, etc. - and work as a simple project management tool.

Optimise Your Time

Centralise all services' communications in a single channel and structure the information you provide to avoid bouncing questions. Our requests system is also scalable, so you can start small and improve as you go, working for any work scenario. You can automate requests to be issued repeatedly, and generate automatic financial reports for accurate billing.

Workflow Transparency

You can follow the status of your experiments either based on fixed workflow or on configurable milestones. Communicate with users whenever needed about the specificities of your request, keeping all interactions in history, and add or remove task peers at any time. Users can also learn from the beginning how much the service is going to cost, and group managers can request budget upon task approval.

Integrate Your Inventory

Manage your stocks by adding your products to our stock management feature, being notified when the quantity reaches the low trigger. You can also use Agendo to keep track of the storage location and inventory of your products - either for freezer racks, drawers or shelves, add the information in any way configurable. Create hazardous sheets by associating the information to your products. You can then associate the hazardous products to the users exposed to them, facilitating health and safety assessments.

REPORTING & BILLING

Robust and Clean Reports and Widgets

Save time and increase your margins with our smart billing and pricing schemes. Use our advanced statistics and dynamic reporting to monitor resource usage and requests and increase efficiency in your laboratory.

Business Intelligence

Check the usage statistics of any calendar, request, facility or group, per user or generally.
You can easily understand important metrics and indicators to achieve your goals by following the dashboard overview. Currently, we offer large tens of small widgets with key information, which can be extended to match your needs.

Financial Reporting

AGENDO works based in a model of financial datawarehouse. With this strategy, we make daily snapshots of the charges in each individual bill item, thus keeping the historical charging consistent. Individual or grouped entries can nevertheless be edited by the managers to correct last-minute changes, like accounts information.

Issue Tracking

When users find an issue in a bookable resource, they can generate a ticket to report slot specific or generic problems. The users can then follow the process until it is resolved. Managers and staff can then filter and organise these tickets, to better keep track of reported users' issues. 

Targeted Surveys

You can direct surveys for quality assessments. Gather information and insights of your respondents on their level of satisfaction using your resources or facility. All surveys are configurable and are automatically available for users, depending on usage, random or hand picked. Furthermore, it is possible to filter responses by dates, so that you can understand the evolution of your facility.

DATA MANAGEMENT

Straightforward Information and FAIR Data

Findable. Accessible. Interoperable. Reusable. Follow FAIR data principles through a comprehensive data management workflow. Raw data is unambiguously linked to instrument-experimental settings.

Information univocally linked

Data and metadata are univocally linked from experimental design to long term storage, thus avoiding lost information and improving reproducibility.
You can link financial accounts to data management plans, so it becomes transparent to the user: the only thing the user needs to care about is to select the proper financial account.

Metadata on FAIR principles

It is important that during and after the project completion, data remains findable, accessible, and enhanced with metadata for scientists to be able to re-use past experiments. This will also improve data reproducibility, which represents a major hurdle to the progress of science. When linked to Nextcloud, most of these hurdles are overcomed.

Data Management Plans

Data management plans (DMPs) are obligatory to all major funding agencies. With Agendo, you can link those granted projects with a predifined and configurable DMP, including predefined datasets and institutional policies. Hence, whether a user books a microscope or requests a NGS service, compliance is guaranteed. Given that DMPs can change with time, versions are saved together with data and metadata, bringing consistency to the process.

Data storage and workflow

Our system is compatible with webdav for remotely save metadata and small amounts of data, that can be either on premises or hosted by us. To transfer large amount of data, we use standard file transfer mechanisms. Our approach is to use a custom small NAS attached to each equipment producing large amount of data, such as NGS or imaging, acting as an interface to generic storage.

Features to cope with COVID-19

'Safety and compliance in Core Facilities during a pandemic'

In this techno bite you will get a glimpse on the key functionalities of Agendo, such as booking methodologies, requesting facility services and communication tools, as well as some interesting tools to address the challenges that COVID pandemic imposed on core facilities. In particular:
a) the ability to control the number of simultaneous bookings for the same room and limiting the number of users;
b) the possibility of enforcing safety measures by configuring a buffer-time between reservations destined to disinfection and/or air renovation;
c) multiple tools enabling workflow flexibility and reliability, keeping the processes going with the necessary adaptations to this pandemic situation.

Presented on January 2021 at the RMS Virtual Meetings

Training

- Distinct user profiles with access to different time schedules for the resource
- Warning notifications about usage
- Information and issues linked directly to the reservation in the software
- Instructions and media attachments

Equipment Usage

- Calendar profiles with room occupancy warnings
- Real usage tracking with notifications
- Buffer time between reservations
- Mobile friendliness to improve access flexibility

Communication

- Mailing lists to target users
- Chat for easier communication
- Issue tracking at the booking slot level
- Requesting services via structured forms, with defined workflows and interactions that need no physical contact

Address

CKLO Lda
Rua dos Lusíadas 4A
1300-370 Alcântara
Lisboa, Portugal