LEADERS ROUNDTABLE


Francois Beiullouin: “The challenge is really to move from supporting a main stream well known workflow to a large set of techniques evolving rapidly and generating many sets of data. This requires extreme flexibility in the eLN forms/template configuration to capture the data in a structured manner and tag it accordingly for future searching / indexing. We are addressing this challenge by really shifting the workflow implementation paradigm from customisation to configuration and taking advantage of dynamic search capabilities with the newly created dataset.”


Thomas Schmidt: “Challenges arise on different levels. First, you have to be able to handle the huge datasets which can easily reach the gigabyte dimension. Second, the data are much more complex requiring specialised evaluation tools. But the challenges are not only limited to the software but also require advanced characterisation capabilities for the analytical instruments. Waters addressed these challenges with an application-focused platform, the Biopharmaceutical System Solution with UNIFITM


. It integrates both UPLC


and MS technologies with Waters’ new UNIFI Scientific Information System. It is the first software that encompasses bioinformatics data processing, visualisation, reporting, and configurable compliance tools.”


Michael Elliott: “What are the greatest challenges your customers face when implementing an ELN?”


Nick Townsend: “By far the greatest challenge is for customers to determine the mix of eLN, LIMS and SDMS functionality they need, establishing a (practical) URS and how to go about implementing it in a cost effective manner. Of course, this becomes even more complex, if a customer already has one of these products, i.e. as a legacy application, rather than starting from a ‘clean sheet’. This has been a challenge for a number of years now, and I guess it’s not helped by the mixed, evolving marketing messages received from the laboratory software vendors as they expand the scope of their eLN products. However, the landscape is becoming clearer now as more and more vendors are providing software with integrated LIMS and eLN functionality reducing the need to, and risk of linking together third party products. These integrated products also eliminate


www.europeanpharmaceuticalreview.com


the problem of ‘should my eLN (vendor) provide this function, or should my LIMS (vendor)’ – it no longer matters, it’s one application.”


Dominic John: “The greatest challenge is keeping it simple. Today’s eLNs can do so much more than just replacing paper notebooks and many scientists are tempted to ask for too much, too quickly. In our experience, customers have the most success when they deploy the eLN in a structured, phased manner, starting with the simplest acceptable configuration. The best way to drive successful eLN adoption is to enable as many scientists as possible to benefit quickly from out-of-the-box capabilities—namely more efficient documentation, easier information re-use and improved collaboration. Once the scientists are familiar and comfortable with the eLN environment and are enjoying the benefits, you can begin integrating other systems, instruments and workflows to further enhance productivity – but only after carefully analysing the return on investment for each enhancement.”


Thomas Schmidt:“Implementing an eLN, like in the course of a Paperless Lab project, is a fundamental change and highly invasive to the lab operation. This requires a behavioural change in which all users have to buy into. It is more than just replacing the paper notebook with an electronic analogue and the users need to be involved into the project from an early stage in order to get their acceptance and to make the implementation a success. Additionally, you can clearly see the tendency that there are fewer projects just focusing on the eLN aspect. The best and most feature-rich eLN doesn’t help you when you don’t have an appropriate data management strategy behind it allowing accessing the relevant information in an efficient way. Therefore, the scope of the projects becomes larger. To make things even more complex, IT strategies additionally are often striving to reduce the number of applications. This results in the need for an eLN being able to cover the requirements of different domains like QC and development that have contradicting needs concerning procedure-oriented and flexible free-flow workflows.”


Pierre Rodrigues: “After some years proposing and selling our LabCollector eLN, we discovered that the more difficult aspect to consider on


users is the migration from paper notes to full informatics writing. This aspect can also be due to higher institution policies, fearing the informatics as a knowledge storing method and imposing paper notebooks as the rule. This is particularly true on academic labs, which are the core of our activity.”


Francois Beiullouin: “Deploying a successful eLN project is not just technological! There are also cultural, political, legal and change management aspects that also need to be considered. Most customers struggle today to free up resources on such projects. We are proud to have very satisfied customers thanks to our experienced Professional Services team. With a global reach at customer sites, we operate in short, agile cycles to gather key users input and deliver mock-ups of what the final setup will be. This closed loop feedback appears to be very efficient and dramatically shortens cycle time to deliver final configurations that users understand and use.”


Glyn Williams:“The most common question is – how fast can we go? The key long-term benefits are business-change, rather than digitisation so the implications of putting in an eLN are not insignificant. Often the business is often caught between a ‘go big and fast ‘to maximise return on investment versus a ‘go small and slow’ to show early results, achieve ‘buy-in’ and ramp up incrementally. So depending on the management culture of the organisations this will vary – powerfully sponsored and directed organisations can go fast and big, whereas organisations that are consensus driven may go small to start with but ramp up as the rollout goes well. The difference also depends on how deep the changes are in the business process associated with the eLN – simple paper replacement projects can go ‘big and fast’ as the change is relatively small for people’s day to day work. Conversely, if the changes represent a deep and complete scientific / lab process re-engineering which often occurs when the groups look at a more holistic, long-term view of their business need e.g. DMPK, Bioanalysis, Bioprocess, Formulations etc then the project methodology is pretty consistent: big goal, incremental steps to get there. Regardless of approach, strong project management and user buy in are key to successful projects big or small.”


European Pharmaceutical Review 25 Volume 16 | Issue 4 | 2011


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25