Business challenge

The facility needed to maintain animal inventories and genealogy while making cage usage, breeding records and billing easier to manage across laboratories.

  • Track individual animals, ancestors, siblings, descendants and litters.
  • Maintain breeding, strain, genotype and cryogenic records.
  • Manage cage usage and billing across laboratories.
  • Send automatic alerts to relevant stakeholders.

AdventSys solution

AdventSys developed an end-to-end animal colony management system with the following capabilities.

  • Barcoded cage cards for animal tracking.
  • Inventory and breeding records.
  • Genotype and strain databases.
  • Billing functionality.
  • Warning and alert functionality.

Business value

The system brought colony records, cage management and reporting into one structured application, reducing dependence on fragmented records and making day-to-day facility administration easier to manage.

Why structured genealogy matters

Colony management is not only an inventory problem. Breeding history, genotype, cage location and lineage are connected records, so a change in one area can affect how later research data is interpreted. A structured model helps users trace relationships without reconstructing them from spreadsheets or isolated notes, and makes routine tasks such as identifying animals, updating cages or planning breeding easier to perform consistently.

Designing for day-to-day research operations

The system also has to fit the pace of a working facility. Alerts, billing information, inventory updates and reporting need to be available without forcing users through unnecessary screens. Role-based access and clear record histories help separate routine operational updates from administrative actions, while reports give teams a way to review colony status without manually merging data from multiple files. Consistent identifiers across animals, cages and breeding records also reduce ambiguity when staff need to follow the same colony history over time.