How Innovative Lab Services Put an Expert in Every Field Engineer's Pocket

"For any field service organization that's considering implementing this technology: go for it. It's going to save you time. It's going to save you money. It's going to save you a lot of headaches. It's going to put your company at the cutting edge. That's been my experience."

Head of Service at ILS

Why Rayni is needed in field service

Field service economics punish a missed first fix. In a 2025 benchmark of roughly 160 service organizations, a failed first visit added 2 more visits on average and stretched resolution out by 14 days.¹ For Innovative Lab Services (ILS), a leading national third-party service organization specialized in chromatography and mass spectrometry, that math is daily reality. Its teams service instruments from many manufacturers for high-throughput labs that are, as ILS's regional field service manager puts it, "counting the dollars every minute" an instrument is down.

Before Rayni, working on an unfamiliar issue meant hours of digging through manuals, parts lists, and other knowledge scattered across Google Drive, SharePoint, and personal devices, and tracking down one changed part number could eat a full day. On complex instruments, a single symptom can have 10 plausible causes, and turning documentation into a prioritized strategy is a skill that takes years to develop.

Why general-purpose AI was not the answer

ILS's regional manager came to this problem early, having already tried ChatGPT and then Grok for field troubleshooting. At company scale they broke down: no memory between sessions, limited document uploads, data-privacy issues, and no willingness to customize for a company of ILS's size and needs. And the tools confidently lied in their answers, because vendors gate their real technical documentation and general models never see it.

"It will, in many cases, make something up and it will say it very confidently so that you think it might be right, and then you can find yourself really burning a lot of time because the response wasn't really grounded in any first source documentation."

Regional Manager, ILS

Why Rayni worked for ILS while other solutions didn't

ILS evaluated several platforms and chose Rayni because we consolidated their scattered knowledge into one searchable place, cataloging thousands of sources and connecting stacks down to the exact model, and we were live in the field in roughly two weeks, not 3 to 6 months. Answers draw on those first-source documents as the source of truth and cite the exact page. The regional manager says they simply haven't encountered a made-up answer, and Rayni committed, contractually and technically, not to train on ILS's data.

The out-of-the-box solution to a problem that convinced a veteran

The moment the regional manager points to involves a Sciex mass spectrometer with a data quantitation issue. They know this class of instrument deeply, and their instinct was the familiar full-day teardown: vent the instrument, pull the rail, clean the optics. Rayni's prioritized list surfaced something that had never occurred to them: a tiny micro-leak on the LC side.

"It came up as one of the first or second things that Rayni suggested that I try. So I said, man, what do I got to lose? I'll try it, and lo and behold, that fixed the issue."

Regional Manager, ILS

First-time fix, in a fraction of the time, with no unnecessary teardown.

What changed

Engineers now turn a little preliminary customer information into a prioritized remote troubleshooting strategy, generate short SOPs for customers to run through, and find changed part numbers in minutes. A dialed-in remote strategy often removes the need for a site visit entirely, and an avoided visit can mean a flight plus a day or more on the ground.

"You're taking now many, many hours of time down to, like, minutes."

Head of Service at ILS

How can AI help service leaders?

Field engineers hate added administrative load, so ILS reads adoption as the real verdict: senior engineers who started as skeptics became power users submitting their own feature requests. That feedback turned directly into the product. The Rayni team adapted the platform to ILS's workflow, met with the field team every week, and built what the engineers asked for. The process not only saved time, it also gave the engineers a sense of agency.

About Innovative Lab Services

Innovative Lab Services (ILS) is an independent, multi-vendor lab instrument service company founded in 2009 and headquartered in Granville, Ohio. ILS maintains, repairs, installs, and validates analytical instrumentation across major manufacturers, with deep specialization in chromatography and mass spectrometry, for clinical, toxicology, forensic, pharmaceutical, biotech, academic, government, and environmental labs.

About Rayni, Inc.

Rayni builds AI for scientific instrument service and lab teams to own, operate, and service instruments with confidence. Learn more at www.rayni.ai or reach out at [email protected].

Footnotes

1. Aquant, 2025 Field Service Benchmark Report (analysis of ~160 service organizations and 600,000+ technician service records). ↩