‘There is a lot of innovation available in the market but I don’t think many labs are picking it up as early adopters,’ said CEO
‘People should ask themselves how important is it adopt new technologies – to innovate in the lab. Having worked in this industry for more than 20 years – of course it is important. You want to see new technology getting into the laboratory either because you want to reduce FTE, you want to increase throughput or improve quality.’
Kox gave an example of large implementation that iVention is managing in Europe that is consolidating as many as seven individual implementations with their own custom software, with additional software connected to it.
‘They cannot upgrade everything all at once,’ he said.
The presence of custom software in each implementation means that each installation is essentially a new piece of software.
‘Now if you compare this to the capabilities of a web-based system you can rollout to all of those sites without custom software – there is a big benefit,’ said Kox.
‘If there is a LIMS project that people who are now looking for a new LIMS or ELN, the decision they make now will affect them for the coming five to 10 years, because that is the investment that you are looking at.’
Kox stressed customers should ask themselves: will this big conventional LIMS vendor help me to innovate? ‘That is where the gap comes in. There’s a lot of innovation out there but can I adopt it right now, because of the systems I have in place?’
He explained that iVention has installed systems across very large organisations. He gave an example of a pharma client who wanted to roll out a system for 300 users across seven countries, over eight months. Cox also mentioned that this solution was hosted for the client by iVention.
‘I don’t think there are many of those rollouts completed successfully with a conventional LIMS system,’ said Kox.
‘They are a big company with their own IT department and we are hosting it for them because we have all the technology in place to automate everything, so all the upgrades can be done automatically.’ He explained the success of this rollout has meant this company is now using iVention as a strategic partner for much larger rollouts in the future.
CEO said: ‘I have seen organisations with very old software, which can be costly and time consuming to maintain and upgrade. Some IT directors would say the upgrade would cost more than the original installation, so they either try and run for a few more years or select a new system.’
He said one of the main challenges when dealing with legacy LIMS or ELN systems is a lack of maintenance and upgradability: ‘The biggest thing I see is customers paying maintenance and they cannot upgrade. Support cannot help them because they have an old version and in many cases this support money is wasted because the system is too old to be properly supported.
‘I would strongly recommend firms look at their maintenance contacts and ask themselves “what are we getting back from it?”
Source:Scientific Computing Winter 2021