LIMS Management Challenge: When There’s Trouble, Who You Gonna Call?
Regardless of industry sector, companies employing LIMS in their labs all suffer from some of the same challenges – many of which stretch beyond the scope of traditional LIMS Support and Maintenance Plans (SMPs).
One of the key challenges is that the time between investigating & identifying a problem or issue and the development response & resolution is too long. And while it may not be the ‘disaster of biblical proportions’ faced by the Ghostbusters team, it can impact not only internal client manpower allocation but also the stability or functionality of the LIMS itself. Because of this, the need for proactive assistance is frequently-heard feedback.
Managed Services address the operational, personnel and technology challenges at customer sites by proactively taking responsibility for managing and improving the LIMS, as well as speeding up the issue resolution process.
What Can You Do With LIMS Managed Services?
More accurately, the question is: what won’t you have to do anymore? Managed Services lets companies hand off the entire LIMS operation, management & optimization. While solving a company’s manpower and expertise challenges, it also improves efficiency with faster troubleshooting and resolution of issues. Full lifecycle application management services for business-critical LIMS solutions allow companies which rely on their LIMS to offload non-core tasks.
Advantages of Managed Services
One of the primary advantages is proactive monitoring – which eliminates or reduces problems before they even appear.
Another advantage – and one cited by a number of customers who have opted for LabVantage’s Managed Services – is clear issue identification. When issues do arise, the question is always which vendor (or internal stakeholder) is responsible? Sometimes it can be difficult to determine who, precisely, is responsible for delivering a solution. In many cases, the problem or issue must be thoroughly investigated and understood before turning it over to the relevant party – a major cause of delays in the problem-solving process.
Customer Success with LabVantage Managed Services
Since 2017, we have been providing Managed Services contracts to clients in the Life Sciences and Biobanking, Government, Quality Control, R&D, and Manufacturing.
LabVantage Managed Services takes full responsibility for the system, giving clients key cost-effective and time-saving advantages. How effective is Managed Services for LIMS? Here are two cases in which Managed Services changed the way companies approached LIMS management, and realized significant productivity gains.
· One LabVantage customer suffered performance degradation, and internal staff couldn’t identify a cause. This led to delays and system downtime. The switch to Managed Services helped immediately identify and resolve such problems, and has prevented other issues from occurring.
· Another customer grew tired of delays when trying to identify who – internally – owned a particular problem, and engaged Managed Services to funnel all challenges through LabVantage. The result has been significant acceleration of issue resolution, as well as a reduction in initial challenges due to ongoing system monitoring.
Novozymes Embraces LabVantage Managed Services
One of the first companies to implement LabVantage Managed Services was Novozymes – a global biotech company headquartered in Denmark. The maker of enzymes and microorganisms used in detergents, food, feed, and numerous other products had relied on LabVantage LIMS for many years.
With nearly 400 LIMS users across countries from Denmark to Brazil, China, the U.S. and India – combined with interfaces to SAP and 6 other MRP systems – the Company’s LIMS is mission critical to the quality of their enzyme production.
Novozymes had experienced some of the same complications discussed above, including issue ownership, resulting in delays troubleshooting and resolving issues. In an effort to forestall future challenges, Novozymes requested that LabVantage take ownership of everything.
According to a senior manager of IT and Technology Development at Novozymes: “We have historically spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘Is this an issue our hosting partner should solve or something LabVantage should solve?’
It was a waste of time discussing all this, so now it has become much, much easier with the Managed Services. The largest improvement seen is that time spent on issues when they appear has gone dramatically down.”
LabVantage Managed Services provided Novozymes with full lifecycle application management services, including:
- proactive monitoring
- 24/7 support
- dedicated team
- proactive planning for enhancements and upgrades
With Novozymes, staff continues to handle some functional support internally. All technical issues (as well as functional support issues which could not be managed in-house) have been escalated to LabVantage. We provide:
- daily monitoring of the production environment
- installation services
- validation testing and documentation support
- bug fixing
- environment maintenance
- system upgrades
LIMS Managed Services Outcomes
For Novozymes, reducing the number of vendors involved increased the clarity of responsibility, and sped up the resolution of issues. Managed Services also reduced the need for internal resources and eliminated overlap between multiple vendors – leading to less management complexity, increased productivity and cost savings.
Read the full case study here or learn more about LabVantage’s Managed Services.
