Freezer and other storage space is never cheap and it obviously pays to utilize the available space as efficiently as possible. However, it is also impossible to expect to make use of samples in orderly blocks. This means that, over time, storage trays will inevitably start to contain spaces amongst what used to be contiguously stored sample batches.

If you have completely empty trays available then the easy answer is to use a new tray for the latest sample batch, so that all the samples are stored in one place. But what happens if you have used (or more accurately “part-used”) all the available trays? Buy another freezer or storage facility? Surely that would be a bit extravagant?

ICAST can help keep your available storage space organised and tidy.

Let’s suppose you have 40 samples to commit to freezer storage and would like to store them all on the same tray. That way, it makes it easier to retrieve the samples when you need them. The new sample batch might also be part of a larger collection of samples, so you also want to keep these new samples in the same vicinity as the existing ones.

ICAST will first let you search on all trays that contain samples that form part of a specific collection

ICAST will also allow you to search for all trays (or other storage levels) which contain more than a specific number of spaces (in this case 40)

Where trays contain the right number of spaces, but the spaces are not located contiguously, ICAST offers the option to automatically reorganise the tray so that all the spaces are at the end of the tray.