Lab Operations Automation

Not everything worth automating is an instrument. The lab’s operational backbone — project and task tracking, weekly cleanroom planning, employee scheduling, inventory — runs on a Google Apps Script system I built and maintain solo, driving a Sheets workbook from a set of Google Forms.

Form submissions route themselves onto per-project task tabs with automatic numbering, status coloring, and audit-friendly edit trails; dropdowns sync themselves from rosters; weekly cleanroom and schedule documents regenerate on every change, serialized behind a lock so concurrent submissions can’t clobber shared state. A script log records every routing decision, and a periodic safety sync keeps the whole thing self-healing.

The design principle that made it durable: every column is found by header name, not position, so the people who actually use the workbook can reorganize it without breaking the machinery. Boring engineering, weekly dividends — it eliminates hours of recurring manual coordination work every week.

Google Apps Script, Sheets, Forms, Workspace APIs. Source is private.