Consolidating freezers

Consolidating Freezers – 00:00

Hello, and welcome to my presentation on how to consolidate your freezers with Freezerworks.  Over time, you'll find you have gaps in many boxes and racks throughout your freezer and you may want to move all the aliquots together in the same order that they are currently in, but move them so that all these gaps are filled up and so that you can better manage your freezer.  I'm going to show you how to do that using Freezerworks.  We have a couple of ways to do it.  You can use the Move Aliquot option and there's a video using this option, but we're going to want to use Assign Positions to Existing Aliquots.

Explore Freezers – 00:42

What I'm going to do here is give you an example.  I'm going to go to Explore Freezers and I have a freezer called Freezer 1 Physical.  In Freezer one physical there is a shelf, Shelf 2 and I want to consolidate Shelf 2.  I have a box in Rack A, first box, and I've got all these empty positions.  Up here I want to move all these aliquots keeping the order up here. Then, after that, the next box and the next aliquots I want to move underneath them.  So, that would be this box here.  So, you can see, there are gaps throughout here.  I want to close up these gaps and move these aliquots into Box 1.  Now, to do that, I'm going to use Assign Positions to Existing Aliquots.  

Sorting Aliquots – 01:40

The first thing I need to do is to select all the aliquots in that freezer position that I’m going to consolidate.  So, I’m going to go to aliquots here.  Now, there are many ways you can do this search, I'm going to use the Simple Search here at the list view.  So I'm going to use the aliquots tab, and I'm going to find Freezer Section Name, and I want it equal to freezer one shelf 2.  I'll do the search and all the aliquots in this freezer section are listed.  There are 97 of these.  Now, the first thing you need to do is put these in the order that they appear in the freezer.  Right now, this thing is not in that order, it's sorted by Freezerworks ID and by Unique Aliquot ID after that.  So you can see that this is the first position which may not necessarily be the first position in the freezer.  I want the positions in the freezer, that's how I want them sorted.  So, I'm going to change the sort.  The freezer section is all the same, no problem.  I'm going to Position1 and I'm going to make that my sort, so I’m going to replace the sort.  So, they're all sorted by first Box A then Box D.  Okay, I need to continue and make sure these are continued to be sorted properly.  So the next sort would be, I would add to this is sort at Position2, then Position3 would Add to Sort as well, and then Position4.  So first sort, second, third, and fourth.  So these should all be in order and we can see here that E1 is indeed the first position. A – 1 – e – 1 all the way to 10, it is a ten-by-ten box. F is next, g is max.  Remember A through D were empty.  We're going to consolidate those and start at A1, so E1 one will go into A1, E2 to A2, and so forth.  So I'm going to look over this and make sure that the sort is completely in order.  So here's my Box D 4 through 10, B 3 through 10, again remember there were gaps some of these are empty positions.  You can tell where the empty ones are as you look at the full ones. C1 through 10, D1 through 10, E7 and 8, F, and G.  The sort is in perfect order in the freezer now.  So the next thing I'm going to do then is assign new positions for each of these aliquots.

Assign Positions to Existing Aliquots – 04:58

Let's go ahead and do that by Sample Management – Assign Positions to Existing Aliquots.  Okay, the first thing I want to do is answer this question: what would you like to do with aliquots that already have positions?  Well, I don't want to skip the aliquot, I want to, of course, Assign a New Position to these aliquots.  Then, I select the Freezer or Freezer Section.  I go into Freezer 1 Physical – Shelf 2, and where do I want to start assigning?  I want to start assigning at the very beginning of the Shelf, A – 1 – A – 1.  So what it will now do when I run the update is it will move the aliquots in this position that they’re sorted in, into the position starting here.  If I want to move them to a different freezer, I could do that as well, but this is how I want to do it (stay in Shelf 2).  I want it to start assigning at the very beginning of this shelf.  So, the next thing I do is press Update.  Now, as you can see, the first aliquot is now in A1, second aliquot in E2, and so forth.  I can scroll down and take a look and see that there are in new positions and they all are in the order that I want them to be in.  If I don't like this, if I see a mistake that I made in some way, I can undo and this would undo the move.  Okay, but everything looks good, so I will go ahead and save this move.  The batch update is now saved and I press Done.  

Finishing the Aliquot Assignment – 07:05

Here are my 97 aliquots starting at A1 and so forth, all the way to A – 1 – J – 7. This is your ten by ten boxes, I had 97 aliquots, they all moved into one box.  The best way to look at this is probably to go to Explore Freezers.  Let's go ahead and do that now.  I hit Close here, and now in View Inventory, I go to Explore Freezers.  Now, let's go back to Shelf 2.  I see now there's only one rack displayed here and only one box.  When I open up the box, I see that my consolidation has taken place.  So, the next step, of course, is to now physically move the aliquots in this order.  A useful thing here is, if in the consolidation there is any confusion of mistakes or something doesn't look right, I can always go to the audit trail.  I double-click on an aliquot and found that aliquot here highlighted.  That would be aliquot, 100117.  It’s the first aliquot, now I’ll go to the aliquot’s Audit Trail, 100 117.  Here it is.  Here, I can see that batch update assigned positions was the process that was last done at this time and date, and I did change the position.  The original position was Box 1 E 1 and the new position, of course, is 1 A 1.  So this looks good and I can do that throughout all the aliquot anywhere I see there might be a problem.  As you can see, I have a nice consolidated box.  That's how you would do it using Freezerworks.  Again, make sure that you use search and that your sort is in the right order and then let Freezerworks assign the positions to existing aliquots and do the work for you.