news
LABORATORY INFORMATICS
Diary Dates
17-20 April Analytica New Munich Trade Fair Centre, Munich
24-26 April Bio-IT World Conference & Expo’12
Boston, MA, USA
2-3 May HC2012
Business Design Centre, London, UK
7-10 May 2012 Inform 2012 – Waters Informatics User Conference Hilton Diagonal Mar, Barcelona, Spain
13-15 May
IDBS Connect 2012 Radisson Blu, Berlin
30-31 May European Lab Automation Hamburg
IN BRIEF
Qlucore has entered into an agreement with Filgen, a Japanese company specialising in sales of science research equipment
IDBS has expanded its business in the US state of Massachusetts with the opening of its Healthcare Center of Excellence Titian Software has announced its Mosaic sample management software has been selected by Roche
UK-based University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust and iSoft, a CSC company, are collaborating on a life science project
T
he 7th annual SmartLab Exchange was held in Brussels at Le Plaza hotel. The main conference
room, a former Royal Decree cinema theater, provided the perfect ambience for initial gathering of 80 senior executives and around 20 vendors. The SmartLab Exchange consists of a mixture of vendors showing their products, presentations from industry experts, one-on-one tailored business meetings and effective peer-to-peer network opportunities. During the opening remarks, I reviewed the current status of the increased overlap of the fragmented applications landscape. These legacy systems often result in higher operational costs, increased IT complexity and are often limiting the deployment of newer, more cost-effective alternatives. The tone of the conference was set by the first lively debate during the interactive workshop ‘What Keeps You Awake At Night?’ Discussions surrounding how to consolidate and integrate LIMS, ELN, LES and ERP systems, reduce operational costs and increase quality were continued during the evening which included a reception and Belgium network dinner. As former FDA chairman McClellan highlighted in the past, the pharma industry has to make significant improvements in quality. With the exception of pharma/life Sciences, all other industries believe in six sigma,
4 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD
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Inside the SmartLab Exchange
Peter Boogaard, founder and CEO of Industrial Lab Automation, and Chairman of SmartLab Exchange 2012, reports on this year’s event
Quality by Design (QbD) and continual improvements strategies, and the lecture ‘Moving from the Racetrack to the lab’, presented by Stephen Rose from McLaren Applied technologies, confirmed how much we can learn from these other industries. It highlights that best practices are often applicable across sectors. After the next round of the one- on-one meetings and an excellent lunch, the afternoon sessions included four interactive workshops and discussions. One of these sessions addressed the overlap between Electronic Laboratory
THE VIEW
THAT ELNS WILL NEVER BE AS COMPLIANT AS A LIMS IS INACCURATE
Notebook (ELN) and Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) functionalities. In its simplest form, an ELN can be thought of as an electronic embodiment of what is currently being done in a paper laboratory notebook. Essentially, it’s a tool that facilitates the workflows that play out in the laboratory. LIMS, ELNs and Lab Execution System (LES) applications all support this basic definition, to a greater or lesser
extent. So what’s the difference between these applications? During the ‘Is the divide between ELNS and LIMS is blurring?’ workshop, very provocative statements ignited discussions. Ultimately, it was concluded that the view that ELNs will never be as compliant as a LIMS is inaccurate. Meanwhile, there was a great deal of agreement with the opinion that ‘we should stop talking about what software products are called. Nobody debates what a smartphone is; a phone, GPS or business organiser? So why are we spending so much time discussing what a LIMS, ELN or LES is?’
The last day of the conference focused on business processes, transformation and change management processes. Transforming processes require people to adopt new policies and the question ‘what’s in it for me?’ is crucial to get buy-in and to support the overall process.
On a personal note, I found that the balance between business meetings, presentations, effective network facilities and the location contributed to efficient peer-to-peer networking, benchmarking and learning for delegation, speakers and vendors. At closing of the event, the organisers announced that the Smartlab Exchange will be heading to the other site of the Atlantic Ocean in 2013.
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