TRIALS MANAGEMENT PLATFORM: ACCELARATING R&D WITH A WORKFLOW-CENTRIC DIGITAL SOLUTION | SPAROS I&D

Case study

Trials Management Platform: Accelarating R&D with a Workflow-centric Digital Solution

Web app implementation

Integration services

Client profile

R&D departments of companies running nutritional and production trials who need a unified digital solution to replace scattered spreadsheets.

Challenge

Managing nutrition and production trials often involves scattered spreadsheets, ad-hoc protocols and considerable manual effort.

Solution

SPAROS developed a digital Trials Management Platform that unifies planning, execution and analysis within one coherent workflow.

Impact

Drawing from real-world experience, including deployments of the HATCHTOOLS environment, the Trials Management Platform maximizes the value of the users’ research. It enables teams to:

Structure trial protocols
Collect data in a guided and standardized way during trial execution
Monitor biomass, growth and FCR with confidence
Automate reporting, generating clean datasets and charts that already include statistical outputs
Reduce variability in data collection
Improve traceability and team coordination
Extract valuable insights from multi-trial datasets

At SPAROS, we apply HATCHTOOLS to manage our own trials. With this tool we have now a consistent way to store and explore over more than a decade of trials that supported the development of our HATCHERYFEEDS.

One of the most striking outcomes has been the reduction of statistical analysis and reporting time: from five days to just five minutes.

Strategy

The Trials Management platform is offered as a service to create a custom trial management web app, designed to align with each client specific trial protocols and reporting standards. Whether the client research focuses on larvae or later stages, we customize the Trials Management platform to meet the user specific needs at every phase of the process. It smoothly integrates several technologies, strengthening experimental rigor while making day-to-day work simpler for researchers and operators alike:

Dynamic Excel Files

Because every researcher is familiar with spreadsheets, the platform leverages pre‑built Excel templates that dynamically adapt based on user configurations. This ensures that data is captured consistently and always follows a structured, standardized format.
R-based Algorithms

Data‑parsing and statistical‑analysis routines developed in R are fully aligned with the structured Excel templates used for data entry. This integration transforms one of the most tedious parts of the R&D process – data handling – into a simple, one‑click operation. The use of this tool at SPAROS has reduced the duration of this process from five days to just five minutes.
Cloud Storage

Structured datasets at the trial level are stored in the cloud, making them accessible from anywhere. The cloud service is fully integrated with the web application, allowing users to review all research data and combine results from multiple trials into a single consolidated table. This unified dataset enhances exploration, reveals patterns that individual trials cannot capture, and creates a solid foundation for power analyses that support the robust design of future experiments.
Shiny Web Application

A Shiny‑based web interface serves as the central hub of the platform, providing an intuitive workflow for configuring trials, uploading datasets, visualizing results, and exporting reports. By bringing data, analytics, and trial management features together in a single user‑friendly environment, the application streamlines daily operations and enables researchers to focus on insights rather than tools.