When something unexpected happens in Empower™, do your analysts know how to approach it, or do they immediately go looking for the go-to expert? If the answer is the latter, the team’s knowledge is relying on heroics.
That bottleneck is a symptom of a problem with the training structure, and SOPs alone won’t solve it. Here’s how you can build competence more effectively.
The Click Path Problem
When analysts learn to use Empower™ software, they often learn by watching someone more experienced and copying their actions. This means they learn which buttons to press and in which order, but not why the workflow is structured that way. It is rarely taught explicitly what Empower™ is doing at each step and what the consequences of deviation are.
This works for routine analysis under normal conditions. But when something falls outside the expected pathway, the analyst has no framework for reasoning through it. And if the analyst does not understand how Empower™ works, they cannot diagnose what has gone wrong or decide what to do next.
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As a result, every Empower™ problem escalates to the one or two people in the lab who understand the software’s logic. This is fine if it happens occasionally, but relying on heroics means that those same “heroes” become bottlenecks. And if they move on to another company, they are difficult to replace, and their departure creates a gap that is not easily filled.
Click Path vs Logic-based Training
Learning to use software by sequence rather than logic is known as “click path” training. As noted previously, it works well enough under routine conditions but can cause problems when something out of the ordinary arises.
How Click Path Dependency Spreads
Click path training typically does not remain confined to a single analyst, and over time, a team can accumulate several. Each person’s sequence might be slightly different, but none is obviously wrong or consistent enough to standardize across the whole team.
An analyst who learned by watching a senior colleague often inherits that person’s click path, including their workarounds, habits, and errors. When they later train someone new, those behaviors are passed on, and the cycle continues.
Unfortunately, SOPs do not solve this problem. This is because a procedure described in writing and a procedure understood in practice are not the same thing. In many Empower™ labs, SOPs describe what should happen, but many analysts will work from what they were shown, rather than what is written down. Unfortunately, this gap is often invisible until a deviation or an audit brings it to light.
Where Click Path Dependancy Causes the Most Issues
Risk 1: Error Correction
One of the riskiest moments for click path dependency in an Empower™ lab is error correction. When something has gone wrong, analysts face a series of decisions: what happened, who is responsible for the correction, what is the error correction workflow, and how reprocessing should be documented.
These decisions require understanding how Empower™ tracks changes, what constitutes a GMP-critical action, and what a compliant correction workflow looks like. Analysts who know only the routine click path have little in the way of a reliable framework for any of this. Under pressure, they either escalate to the “heroes” or, more dangerously, improvise.
Risk 2: Data Review
The same pattern appears during data review. Inexperienced reviewers who do not understand what is critical in Empower™ tend toward one of two failure modes:
- They skim, assuming the experienced analyst made no errors
- They check everything exhaustively without knowing what actually matters, spending time on low-risk parameters while potentially missing high-risk events they do not recognize as significant
Both behaviors stem from a lack of understanding of where important information lives in Empower™ and what requires deeper investigation.
What Logic-Based Training Looks Like
The good news is that click path training can be corrected using a program designed to build logic-based understanding rather than memorization.
1. Make sure the fundamentals are solid
Empower™ competence starts with fundamentals, including the system’s terminology, data structure, and logic connecting method types. Before performing routine analyses, new analysts need to understand how Empower™ works. They should know the purpose of each method, how data flows from acquisition to final results, how integration parameters affect chromatograms, how projects are organized, and how changes are tracked within the system.
2. Use relevant, real-life examples
From there, training should move to workflow practice on the lab’s own data and methods. An analyst who has only ever seen Empower™ working on foreign chromatograms has no anchored understanding of what their own results should look like. They also don’t understand what their own processing method is doing, or what a deviation from their own baseline means. Training your analysts on relevant data builds contextual understanding.
3. Train analysts in problem-solving scenarios
Training should extend beyond routine workflows and prepare analysts for situations where simple click-path instructions are no longer sufficient.
This includes GMP-compliant error correction and manual integration workflows, audit trail review, and troubleshooting of unexpected events. These are where procedural knowledge reaches its limits, and a deeper understanding of the underlying workflow and system logic becomes essential. They are also the moments that carry the greatest risk in a GMP environment and therefore deserve particular attention during onboarding.
4. Re-train regularly
This is not a problem confined to new or junior analysts. Experienced users who have worked with Empower™ for years can carry extensive click path knowledge across a wide range of situations. However, this can create a false sense of confidence if the underlying workflow logic is not fully understood.
Regular refresher training, even for experienced teams, helps rediscover underused Empower™ functionalities and challenge habits that may have developed over time.
It also provides an opportunity to harmonize workflows across the team and ensure that everyone works according to the same principles and standards.
The Benefits of Logic-based Training
The benefits of shifting from click path to logic-based training are not primarily about efficiency. Although workflows do become more consistent and faster to maintain.
The more significant effects are:
- Reduced dependency on individual experts
- Faster and more reliable onboarding
- A team that can handle deviation and error correction in a controlled, GMP-compliant way
Because the click path problem touches everything, small improvements to training architecture can create significant operational impact. Workflow consistency, review reliability, onboarding speed, and compliance risk often depend on ensuring your analysts do not rely on memory alone.
If you are working through Empower™ workflow challenges or onboarding new analysts and want to discuss what structured competence building looks like in practice, LabWissen specializes in practical, GMP-compliant Empower™ training and consulting built around your lab’s own workflows and data.
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