LabAnswer is a laboratory informatics consultancy that has the people, processes and experience to scale and deliver enterprise laboratory informatics projects.

 

 

LABANSWER LABORATORY INFORMATICS PROJECT SPOTLIGHT

 

Migration Effort Produces $1M Savings

As a result of data load problems, significant cost overruns and delayed schedules plagued the global rollout of an enterprise LIMS system. It was calculated that at one plant the LabAnswer migration technique resulted in over a $1 million dollar savings.

 
LabAnswer's migration technique resulted in over a $1 million dollar savings

 

Solution Overview

Company

Tier One Pharmaceutical Company

Customer Profile

A global pharmaceutical company that had grown rapidly through acquisition

Business Situation

The need to harmonize QA LIMS systems globally for unified management and reduced costs

Solution

Migrate existing systems to standardized LabWare LIMS configuration
Business and Technology Goals

A tier one pharmaceutical company built a standard LabWare LIMS configuration and was in the process of rolling it out globally. The data load processes proved to be more difficult than anticipated. The large integrator running the project indicated that it was not possible to migrate the data from existing systems. A technique was needed to reduce the amount of time and errors with the manual entry of data into the new system.
Solution

LabAnswer designed a process to extract information from the existing LIMS, rationalize the data and load it into the new LabWare LIMS configuration. Not all data could be transferred from the existing LIMS and a direct Oracle to Oracle migration was not possible due to the differences in data structures between the two systems. However, the migration allowed much data to be extracted, rationalized to the new system, and loaded in a manner that significantly reduced the amount of time required to define the basic Master Data in LabWare LIMS.

Data Extraction

This process defines the data required from each of the existing LIMS tables with the appropriate relationship of the data. Tables include:

      • User
      • Analyses
      • Product
      • Vendor and Manufacturer
      • Product Actives
      • Product Family
      • Versions
      • Location

Data Rationalization

The rationalization of the existing data was handled through loading the data into spreadsheets where it was then processed through manual and programmatic reviews to ensure compatibility in the new system.

Data Loading Process

The rationalized data was loaded and tested in the development database. After loading a set of review tests were conducted to ensure that nothing in the data load operation inhibited or precluded the normal and expected use of the system. All master data was reviewed after the migration per the LabWare Master Data Protocol. Upon successful testing the data will be loaded into the production database.
Benefits

It was calculated that at one plant the LabAnswer migration technique resulted in over a $1 million dollar savings. In excess of 15,750 records were successfully transferred with only two errors detected.