The Benchling Compliance Controls Team is excited to introduce the Chain of Custody - Container History Report. This was released to standard tenants earlier this fall with the launch to Validated Cloud customers expected in January 2024! These reports provide comprehensive tracking for sample data and are Benchling’s key milestone on the way to offering Chain of Custody in the future.
With Chain of Custody reporting, you can now:
- Improve traceability of sample containers
- Track the end-to-end lifecycle of a sample container from creation through use and archival.
- Verify sample integrity for audit purposes
- Identify errors in sample handling across users and container activity.
- Increase speed of data aggregation for reporting
- Minimize manual search and collation of sample container audit data from multiple sources.
- Ensure consistent reporting of sample container activity
- Standardize format of data exports across sample containers.
The Container History Report allows teams to understand the sample’s history, for example:
- “Where has this sample been?”
- “Who had custody” or “Who transferred contents?”
- “How can I better understand additional context around sample container historic events?”
A container history report is a document containing the history of an entity within a container, including who handled the sample and when, what actions were performed against the sample, and the locations, dates, and times of those actions. After downloading the report, you can review it to track information, like how many people handled the sample, its location changes over time, and under what storage conditions the sample was maintained.
Download the Container History Report
- Where in the UI can you access the Container History Report? How do you download the Report from the Container and how can you also access the report through the Global Search menu?
Structure of the Container History Report
- Understand the structure of the Container History Report and definition of columns that appear in the Report.
Reports render in an intuitive format that includes one update per row, before and after changes in separate columns, and consistent formatting across all change events.
The table below describes each column in the audit log and what they represent.
| Column name | Column description |
| Timestamp (UTC) | Datetime the activity occurred |
| User | Username for the account that made the update. |
| Activity description | Overview of the action performed |
| Item | Object the action was performed on |
| Old value | Previous value before change occurred, if the action resulted in an item value changing |
| New value | New value after change occurred, if the action resulted in an item value changing |
| Container | Container the report was exported from. If the event was an entity transfer, this field populates the container the entity was transferred into. |
| Entity | The entity or entities in the container |
| Inventory location | Inventory path (location hierarchy) for the container |
We are delighted to provide the Benchling Community with the ability to trace your samples. Let us know if you’ve had a chance to try out this feature or if you have any feedback to share!