DNA-encoded library technology has emerged as a powerful hit finding approach in drug discovery. Over the past five years, we have established a platform for using DEL that has become a valuable source of hits for our organization. This talk will describe how we approached this new technology, key limitations we encountered and the innovations we developed to address them. I will discuss simple computational simulations that clarified what we might expect from the technology and how we use these to maximize the robustness of our data in support established hit calling and Machine Learning applications.