Moruya
The new digital revolution for chain of custody sample tracking and analysis
What Are Chain of Custodies?
To put it simply, a chain of custody (CoC) is the chronological documentation or paper trail that records the custody, control, transfer, analysis and disposition of physical evidence. In contaminated land, this could be soil, water or air samples that are collected on site, documented and sent to a lab for analysis.
This process relies heavily on paper to document each and every bit of information. Moruya’s digital platform takes away the headache and confusion of paper tracking, with a cloud-based solution that gives traceability and accountability back to the user. Moruya's ease-of-use allows a field scientist to generate a new lab request on any device, upload CoC information, store, edit, and submit CoCs to a lab, and arrange for a courier to pickup and deliver site collected samples. All within Moruya's app.
Problem Overview
A CoC serves a fairly simple purpose. Legal requirements require the storage of evidential information to create its chronological documentation. A person needs to know what the evidence is, where it is, who has possession of it, and its eventual fate. Historically, this has always been achieved with paper with little to no digital alternatives.
Whilst paper has its strengths in certain applications and situations, its use as a mechanism of tracking and tracing becomes exceedingly difficult when: there’s large quantities of information, evidence travels long distance, there’s multiple custodians, there’s the complexity of information transformation. The transfer of a CoC has always been a manual process between parties.
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The moment you introduce manual hand-off within a process chain, the risk of human error grows exponentially. This was something we had to eliminate with Moruya.
Addressing the Pain
We needed to avoid one of the most common pitfalls with start-ups, making the problem too “self-serving”. Our biggest challenge was to ensure our understanding of the customer’s pain allowed us to develop a solution that provided enough value to replace the current paper workflow.
Pain Point
Analysis labs hire dedicated staff to manually transcribe sample metadata from their client's CoC documents into a lab database. This can take days.
Overflow Effect
Manuel data entry creates a processing bottleneck within a lab’s sample analysis chain.
A lab analyses fewer samples per day due to the slowdown of CoC processing.
No standardization between CoC documentation between laboratories and their clients.
Laboratories receive no notification when new sample shipments are expected to arrive.
Moruya's Solution
Our goal with customer research was to establish a deep understanding of current workflows, frustrations, and areas where we can change their lives. It was imperative that the barrier of entry to Moruya was kept at a bare minimum. We needed a frictionless experience that was more reliable than paper.
Our task was to develop a platform that transformed the complexity of CoC documentation into a digital platform. Moruya’s platform needed to have similar information parity with paper CoCs, whilst removing unnecessary repetition. This was for legal compliance reasons.
User Stories
It was critical that we put the users at the forefront of Moruya’s solution and at the centre of the conversation. During development, we needed to know what the end goal’s were, why we were building, and what value it created.
Our task was to develop a platform that transformed the complexity of CoC documentation into a digital platform. Moruya’s platform needed to have similar information parity with paper CoCs, whilst removing unnecessary repetition. This was for legal compliance reasons.
User Flow
Moruya’s user flow provides a streamlined and natural progression from the moment they sign-in and view the active CoC laboratory requests, create new samples and order a courier for delivery.
There are many different components users interact with. Inputs, dropdowns, buttons, toggles, cards, and side scrolling were all fighting for the user's attention. Too much information could overwhelm the user so we kept it to the bare minium.
