LABORATORY INFORMATICS

Today it is imperative to make the most of your resources and still be prepared to accommodate future growth.

 

Outsourcing Laboratory Informatics for Improved Efficiencies

Business and Technology Goals

Our client determined it was time to outsource their informatics environment. They were facing a multi-year backlog of enhancement requests, difficulties finding strong Informatics resources, disparate LIMS systems and the anticipation of high growth due to an increased attention to new product development testing. Their informatics environment consisted of six separate LabWare LIMS applications, different instrument control applications, and hundreds of instruments supporting eighteen different laboratories along with interfaces to SAP.

The business had three objectives by teaming with LabAnswer:

  • Improve response time to requests from the business
  • Reduce cost to support systems
  • Be prepared for future growth

Solution

LabAnswer was chosen as the laboratory informatics outsourcing partner because of our deep understanding of the laboratory environment, the number of consulting experts and the breadth of our experience.

After careful analysis LabAnswer recommended a four pronged approach to the outsourcing:

  • Provide a flexible staffing plan with a sufficient number of LIMS subject matter experts to support the existing environment, work down the backlog of enhancement requests, implement new Informatics systems, and provide future strategy and direction for their rapidly expanding Informatics needs.
  • Implement industry best practices including change control, request tracking, prioritization, and escalation procedures in addition to implementing a Service Level Agreement (SLA) approach to supporting the business which included weekly metrics reports.
  • Consolidate their six LIMS into just two systems, one for manufacturing and one for R&D in order to simplify application support.
  • Integrate all of their instruments to their LIMS system in order to increase data entry accuracy and improve lab throughput.

Benefits

The benefits of teaming with LabAnswer have been significant.

  • Our client has calculated a ROI on support of 100%.
  • Lower overhead has been attained through consolidation of the LIMS.
  • The backlog for requests has been reduced from multi-year to less than one month.
  • We have been recognized as a preferred partner.
  • Industry best practices have been employed.
  • The client is poised for growth.