informatics in petrochemicals
ongoing cost of process inefficiency will be incurred by every refinery because ,while fit for the purposes of the corporation, the LIMS is not fit for the individual purposes of each refinery,’ says the company. Similarly, it points to challenges of removing this integration if a company with a consolidated LIMS sells a refinery to a competitor. Instead of integrating LIMS across a
company, Baytek recommends maintaining the autonomy of the individual lab systems while at the same time providing a corporate view of the data across the enterprise. Baytek’s VortalBliss LIMS enterprise architecture enables this approach, says the company.
Beyond LIMS Meanwhile, the solution may not be a LIMS at all, according to PerkinElmer. Following a number of acquisitions over the past couple of years, the company has a new platform, Ensemble, which includes capabilities of both LIMS and ELN. ‘We have a laboratory execution system
(LES),’ explains Dale Seabrooke, QA/QC product manager at PerkinElmer. ‘We’re seeing that customers have made big investments in SAP enterprise soſtware so want this to do some of their LIMS functions. We do
LES to integrate with SAP. Everyone’s IT departments want to consolidate on fewer technologies. LIMS are very passive and in a lot of cases we see the LES handling what the LIMS has done in the past,’ he says. ‘Many organisations will want to have a LIMS and that’s still a very important part of our portfolio, but we are seeing the adoption rate of LES going up.’ Whichever approach
Further information
Baytek International
www.baytekinternational.com
Bruker Chemical and Applied Markets
www.bruker.com
Intertek
www.intertek.com
Labware
www.labware.com
petrochemical companies take to their data and processes, there’s no denying the global nature of the industry and this has an impact. ‘Tere is a much higher demand in China than other markets and we are seeing significant moves of production capacity,’ notes Turston of Termo Fisher Scientific, who adds that Latin America is similar. Such moves bring in the challenges of
PerkinElmer
www.perkinelmer.com
Starlims
www.starlims.com
Thermo Fisher Scientific
www.thermofisher.com
multilingual support and allow customers to input in other languages,’ he says. However, the translation
and production costs of this are high and there are questions about how much needs to be translated and whether this should be just the interface or the underlying data too. Te issues get more complicated with global businesses where people might want to input in different character sets, such as Arabic and Roman. Fortunately, Turston
estimates that around 90 per cent of the data entered into a LIMS or similar system is numerical based, which does not pose the same challenge, but defining the collected
information is much more textual. Te petrochemical industry’s drive towards
language support. ‘Our systems were originally conceived in English only. In the past seven or eight years, we’ve added the capability to offer
efficiency seems set to continue as the industry looks to new sources of oil and other fuels, as well as new markets. And the informatics industry plans to be right alongside it.
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