MiAlgae reduces total documentation time by 75% with unified Seal Platform

MiAlgae was scaling from lab to commercial production of Omega-3-rich algae. Turning whisky industry waste into a sustainable alternative to fish oil. The science worked. The compliance infrastructure didn't.

Their processes were documented on paper. Batch records were handwritten. Lab notebooks were physical. Quality events were tracked in spreadsheets. Every hour spent on documentation was an hour not spent on the science that made the company valuable.

The problem wasn't just speed. It was visibility. When a customer asked for traceability from raw material to final product, assembling the answer meant pulling physical records from multiple locations. When the quality team wanted to understand why a batch underperformed, the data existed but couldn't be queried. The information was captured. It just wasn't accessible.

As production volumes grew, the paper systems that worked at bench scale started breaking. Batch records took longer to complete. Review cycles stretched. The team was spending more time documenting work than doing it. And the gap was widening with every new production run.

MiAlgae deployed Seal as a single platform across their ELN, QMS, and electronic batch records. The transition replaced three separate documentation workflows with one connected system.

Lab scientists moved from paper notebooks to structured digital protocols. The same experiments they'd been running were now captured in a format that could be searched, compared, and built upon. When a process developer wanted to see every fermentation run above a certain yield threshold, the query took seconds instead of an afternoon of binder searching.

Batch records went digital. Operators followed guided workflows on screen instead of filling out paper forms. The batch record populated from the process as it happened. Weights from balances, readings from instruments, timestamps from the system. Review shifted from checking every handwritten entry to reviewing exceptions flagged by the system.

Quality processes. Deviations, CAPAs, document control, training. All moved onto the same platform. When a deviation occurred during a batch, it linked directly to the batch record, the operator's training status, and the SOP version in use. The investigation started with context, not a search for context.

Documentation time dropped by 75%. The hours that scientists and operators had spent writing, filing, and retrieving paper records were returned to productive work. For a company where the science is the competitive advantage, this wasn't an efficiency gain. It was capacity recovered.

The traceability that customers required became instant. Raw material lot to fermentation batch to final product. The forward and backward traces that used to require assembling physical records now returned in seconds from the system.

But the real change was cultural. With documentation no longer a burden, the team started capturing more. Not less. Process observations that would never have made it into a paper notebook got recorded because the system made it easy. Over time, this created a dataset that powered process improvements the team couldn't have made with paper records.

MiAlgae scaled from lab to commercial production with the same platform. No system migration, no re-validation, no second implementation project. The system they used for their first batch is the system they use for their thousandth.