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 The LabWare LIMS Contract Lab Module is a no cost LIMS add-on that is designed to provide functionality needed by Contract Laboratories. Specifically, it deals with the Lab-Customer interaction in great detail.
There are three major aspects to the module:
- Specifying the laboratories' customers in terms of who they are, where they are, and how to interact with them.
- Specifying the testing that is to be done in terms of the customers' products being analyzed.
- Specifying the pricing that applies for each customer.
The Contact Role Manager is the focal point of the Contract Lab Module in LabWare LIMS. Contract Labs interact with their customers via the Contact Role Manager. The concept is that the lab actually interacts with a number of people who represent the "customer". Since these people can change throughout the life of a customer interaction, within LabWare LIMS the customer is abstracted to a "Contact Role".
Contact Roles then relate to the people that are involved in the Lab to Customer interaction. These people represent the following functions:
- People who receive result reports
- People who receive invoices
- People who are allowed to receive results via phone
- The Lab's Customer Service representative
- The Lab's Technical Service Director representative
The Contact Role also encompasses the notion of from which locations samples can be submitted. In general, the lab may have more than one program of work with the customer. Each "Contact Role Program" may have its own pricing rules, and may require other individuals to receive reports.
Contract laboratories often do business with different divisions of the same company, or different companies owned by a common parent company. To negotiate contracts it is useful to be able to determine how much testing is being performed at different aggregation levels of the main company.
The Contract Laboratory Module facilitates this concept by allowing corporate hierarchies to be defined. There are four levels to the hierarchy:
- Ultimate Parent Company
- Parent Company
- Division
- External Location
Ultimate Parents can have many Parents; Parents can have multiple Divisions; and, Divisions can have multiple External Locations.
The first three levels of the hierarchy are defined together from the top down and External Locations point to a Division. The reason for this approach is that the people setting up new Contact Roles (and therefore, External Locations) often do not know about the overall corporate hierarchy of their customer.
All levels of the hierarchy must be defined. Companies that do not have all of the levels can repeat the name for the Ultimate Parent, Parent, and Division.
The BILLING_INFO table holds information about how the customer is to be billed. The following fields show the type of information stored in the table.
Billing Information is associated with Contact Role Programs. The idea is that if a customer is submitting work that falls under different programs, they may be billed differently.
Work that is performed for customers is always associated with a Program. Programs define the following:
- Customer's Products and how they are to be tested
- Specification Limits
- Rules for determining test prices
- Additional Persons to receive reports or invoice copies
Programs can have associated Technical Service Directors and Customer Service Representatives.
Basically, Programs correspond with "Customer Contracts" in that they have an effective time frame and test pricing rule.
Program Persons are persons that are associated with the program and may or may not be associated with a Contact Role. For example, different companies could be submitting their products for testing, and their customer receiving copies of the results.
Program Products are the customers products that are sent in for analysis. The idea is that the customer will specify the testing for the types of items that they are submitting. By defining these products up front, sample login and test assignment are expedited.
Pricing can be handled by the Charge Manager, or by Pricing Rules. Pricing Rules determine list price and price field values for test records. Pricing Rules are associated with Programs. When tests are assigned, LIMS determines the pricing rule to use by looking at the program field in the sample. |