TL;DR
- Best Use of Features winner at Playbook 2026 — Trainual's award for teams pushing the platform furthest
- 40 subjects with e-signature enabled — more than any other customer at Playbook 2026
- 85% group activation, plus 95 training assignments completed in a single month
- 100% pass required on tests for critical functions, with timestamps proving who trained on what and when
- Audit evidence on demand — no reconstructing a paper trail when a regulator asks
- Paper walkthroughs and share-drive Word docs retired — including the eight-year-old ones
Excel Scientific makes the thing you never think about until it fails.
Founded in 1992 in Victorville, California, and relocated to St. Paul, Minnesota in June, the company manufactures microplate sealing films and foils — the medical-grade adhesive layers that keep samples from evaporating, spilling, or cross-contaminating during PCR, qPCR, ELISA, cell culture, and long-term storage. Their films end up in pharmaceutical labs, diagnostic OEMs, clinical labs, universities, and biotech companies around the world.
Mindy Rowley, the company's VP and General Manager, puts the stakes in plain terms.
"We serve lab space in research and development. So, help with cures, help with diagnosis and all the fun stuff." — Mindy Rowley
Which means every step in Excel's own process is a step in somebody else's diagnosis. That's a lot of weight for a company whose training used to live in a filing cabinet.
The knowledge that walked out the door
Excel had a knowledge problem long before it had a training problem.
"One of the biggest problems that we had was that tribal knowledge. We had a lot of ways that people knew how to do things — and then sometimes, especially during COVID, that walked out the door. We didn't have that sense of how do we get things done, and how do we do it consistently." — Mindy Rowley
Two things happened at roughly the same time. Excel went from being a founder-owned business to being part of a private equity-backed platform. And with that came a mandate to level up its quality system — including ISO 9001:2015 certification, which meant proving, on paper, that the company's people knew their jobs.
"In that we had to really get our hands around how do we best support our team." — Mindy Rowley
The person who pointed at the answer was already on staff. Celeste Celis had used Trainual at a previous company and brought it to the leadership team's attention.
"Our teammate Celeste is wonderful and brought Trainual to the forefront of our minds. And it's been an exciting challenge ever since." — Mindy Rowley
Celeste's own version of falling for the platform is short.
"I fell in love with the organizational part of it — how the capabilities were very modern. It was a new approach to keeping things all in one place. That was the most helpful thing that we could do for our staff and helping them grow." — Celeste Celis
Before: print it, read it, sign it, hope
The old system wasn't a system. Celeste can still walk through it step by step, because it's how she was trained when she started.
"We have a share drive where we'd go on there. It was in like a Word document that somebody wrote out maybe either a month ago or like eight years ago. And then from there, you'd have to print that out, have the person read through it, kind of walk through it with them. Be like, 'Okay, that's outdated, but that part goes over here.'" — Celeste Celis
She kept the evidence.
"I still have a lot of my first training documents where I just have notes from the side of it. I kind of keep it as like a nice little souvenir of what I don't want to go back to." — Celeste Celis
Mindy's summary of the compliance side of that setup is the part that should make any regulated operator wince.
"Everything was on paper. So we met with every employee individually. We tried to go through what the responsibilities were. We tried to make sure that we had it captured. We didn't have a feedback loop to say we need more or we need to understand more. And we signed off on a sheet of paper hoping that they knew what they needed to know." — Mindy Rowley
After: proof instead of hope
Excel now has 40 subjects with e-signatures enabled — more than any other customer in the room at Playbook 2026, and a large part of why the team took home the conference's Best Use of Features award. It isn't a vanity stat. For Mindy, it's the entire point.
"For us, compliance is huge. We need acknowledgement of what people know they're supposed to be doing. We have to be able to prove out that they've received the right information, that they understand what the expectations are. And that's one way for us to hold accountability to that and know that they really do understand it." — Mindy Rowley
Signatures are the floor. Testing is the ceiling.
"I can put a test in. I can require 100% pass because it's a critical function. I can check. Before, we'd ask questions, they'd read from a document. They may or may not get it. It may not be digestible." — Mindy Rowley
And then there's the part that matters when someone from outside walks in with a clipboard. As Excel's quality lead framed it during the conversation: Trainual gives the team readily available information that an auditor can ask for on the spot — and the company can produce as evidence. Mindy filled in the mechanics.
"We have those timestamps. We know exactly when they trained on it last, when they last looked at it, if they have those tests, did they pass it. And that's where I think training can continue to advance — in those regulated spaces." — Mindy Rowley
Excel even encoded the standard into the platform itself. Subjects are named with their ISO reference up front — a work instruction like WI 851 points directly to where in ISO 9001:2015 the procedure lives, followed by what the procedure actually is. Open the subject list and you're looking at a map of the quality system.
The feedback loop is the product
Plenty of companies buy a training platform and let it calcify. Excel built a culture that makes that impossible.
Mindy is in the platform daily.
"I'm on training every single day. I'm in it. From the time that I log in in the morning, I'm looking to see what's happening. I get content feedback, which is amazing, because that allows me to say, okay, what do people need more to feel successful in what they're doing? And then the feedback tool is like my best friend." — Mindy Rowley
The reason people actually leave feedback is a deliberate choice about who owns knowledge.
"We really try to push a culture of that every operation is important and everybody owns their own space. They are the expert. I am not the expert to write this stuff for them or to tell them how to do it." — Mindy Rowley
Celeste describes the validation loop that follows.
"We write out something based off of a procedure that we know, but we always go to the subject matter expert to get it validated. We don't want to write out a process that's like, okay, step one go do this — and then actually the person's like, that's step four, or that's step six, or you forgot 10 of those steps before that." — Celeste Celis
And because good intentions fade, Excel made documentation a measured expectation.
"We'll even make it a part of their KPI. So we'll say, hey, this quarter we want you to write out some subjects based off of this procedure, this process. Give the power to them while we then go and clean it up." — Celeste Celis
The loop only holds because leadership closes it. Employees leave a comment knowing something happens next.
"Once they are in, because they've done it, it's so easy for them. They don't have to stop us. They don't have to track a person down. They can put what they need to put there, and they know we're going to come back to them. So it creates that responsiveness that they also need to see to feel supported." — Mindy Rowley
How they got a lab to care: a scavenger hunt
Getting a manufacturing and lab-operations team genuinely comfortable inside new software is the hard part of any rollout. Excel ran contests.
"One of the funnest ways I think we had was last spring, when we were really trying to get some impact and get people into the system and using it consistently. We created a scavenger hunt. Part of it was around how to find things — search for this, tell us where you find this — so that they use the functionality and the tools to get really comfortable with the space." — Mindy Rowley
Then they pushed it off the screen.
"And then also having in-person contests of, go see the person that manages this area and get this answer. And they had a stamp and they got a prize. Whoever finished, those turned in their scavenger hunt forms and they were in for a drawing in the end. That was probably one of the most engaging parts of it. People had a lot of fun, and it became a contest — who's going to finish first?" — Mindy Rowley
Earlier campaigns ran on the same logic: contests asking the team to tell leadership what content was missing and what should be built next. The prize was participation. The real payoff was a team that knew its way around the platform by the time the compliance content landed — and 85% group activation to show for it.
Emojis, in a lab
Excel's content is about films, adhesives, thermal cycling, and quality clauses. Celeste's fix for that was not more rigor.
"We work in a laboratory sort of scientific company where a lot of things are very diagnostic-based and can get a little bit overwhelming if you're not from that space. So part of the reason that we wanted to do this is to make it interactive, make it fun, break it up with like an emoji, a GIF. If you go through our content, you'll see that I've emojified a lot of things." — Celeste Celis
The reasoning underneath it is sharper than it sounds.
"It makes it a little bit more human-to-human of an experience — like somebody actually wrote it and it wasn't a robot. It wasn't somebody with a degree in science that made that content. It was a little bit of an actual human." — Celeste Celis
Alongside the emojis: embedded videos, Looms, screenshots, and photos. Which turns out to matter for reasons beyond tone.
"We can include screenshots, they include videos. So based on the different people's learning styles, they have the ability to get to what they need any of those ways. And that's the difference with going paper document, where you're reading something and you hope it connects somehow." — Mindy Rowley
Built with Excel, not just for them
Excel became a design partner, and several of the features they now rely on started as their asks.
The first was commenting — born out of the two-person trenches phase of implementation.
"Mindy and I, when we first started doing Trainual, it was just her and I in the thick of it. We tried to take everything that was in our paper-based platform and turn everything into Trainual. Sometimes there were things where I was working on a process that I wasn't really familiar with. So I had to go in and tell her, hey, can you go screenshot, edit this, fix this for me? And then getting that comment feature was really helpful." — Celeste Celis
E-signature was the other. Both now sit at the center of how the company runs — commenting for the build, e-signature for the proof.
One screen for the process, one for the work
Excel logged 95 assignments in a single month, spread across quality, service, fulfillment, and every people manager mapped to the processes they own. But the everyday win Celeste points to is smaller and more human than any assignment count.
"Now you could just search up a keyword or a form number on Trainual, go back, reread it, and get that refresher. I have so many of my staff that do that now, where it's like, hey, need you to fill in for so-and-so, can you do this? Send them a Trainual link, and they have one screen with the Trainual and the other screen with the actual software that they're working through, and get it done that way. And they thank me for that all the time." — Celeste Celis
On-the-job training forms still exist — Excel just runs them with Trainual integrated, so the documented process and the hands-on walkthrough are the same thing rather than two separate paper exercises.
Ask either of them what disappears if Trainual disappears and the answers arrive fast.
"Everything. Our sanity, mainly, probably. That's the first one." — Celeste Celis
"Compliance. And we'd have to figure it out real quick. And that's not a pretty thing to have to go through." — Mindy Rowley
Followed immediately by: "We'd have to revert back to the whole paper." And then, from both of them: "Please. No."
Still a work in progress — which is the honest part
Excel isn't claiming a finished system. A recent addition to the quality team has been walking through processes and finding places where the documentation doesn't yet match reality. Mindy treats that as the system working.
"We're walking through things where we're finding gaps in the Trainual processes that we have. But now we have it documented. We know, okay, this is the miss. Okay, now let's prioritize that." — Mindy Rowley
Celeste is equally direct that the org chart of ownership is still being built out.
"We're still very much in the works of that. Still very much trying to perfect it and come up with a good system. But it's been a work in progress." — Celeste Celis
Which is precisely why Mindy's advice to anyone hesitating doesn't involve a perfect plan.
"But did you document it?"
Mindy has a sign on her desk. It's a Chris Ronzio line, and she's made it company policy.
"I love it because Chris always shares the 'document it.' So I have a sign on my desk that says, 'But did you document it?' So people know if they come and ask me a question, the very first thing I'm going to ask them is: did you look in Trainual?" — Mindy Rowley
For anyone weighing cost or time, she doesn't hedge.
"Do it. Just do it. You don't have to be perfect to start. It's a starting point. It helps people get centered, helps people get down the ideas of what they need — and you can continue to improve that in a very easy way." — Mindy Rowley
Celeste's version, for the operator still running on a share drive:
"Start that immediately. Make it a centralized place. Give yourself a safe space, a place to breathe, and just have your team be able to find what they need to find." — Celeste Celis
Learning more about Trainual
Ready to make your process provable? Explore more customer stories.
Want to try Trainual for you and your team? Get a demo.
