The increasing need for improved efficiency, precision and 24/7 operation imply more and more sophisticated measures in laboratory automation. This is true for a variety of fields – from pharmaceutical to food, agricultural, and the petrochemical industry, as well as forensics and medical diagnostics. Chemical and biological tests have to be supported by very small individual samples in medicine and forensics, up to continuous flow production with inline quality control in the chemical industry. A vast variety of physical, chemical, and biological methods need to be supported by experiment design and control, data acquisition and evaluation, documentation as well as simulation. Time constraints, high performance, extensive resource utilisation, and reproducibility of results demand a high degree of automation including unmanned operation. Global collaborations within multinational companies are the order of the day. Regulatory compliance with its diversity of validation processes increases the complexity of tasks. In addition, laboratory automation is no longer limited to R&D or production laboratories; it is now totally integrated into almost all production systems in a globalised enterprise. Adequate automation solutions always need the expertise of domain experts and automation specialists.