 | LabWare GOLD Methodology Overview
 LabWare strongly believes that customers should be able to support their LIMS implementation themselves. Our entire business model is to develop superior yet customer-friendly LIMS solutions and to teach our customers how they can use those solutions effectively without unnecessary reliance on vendors. LabWare's interaction with a customer starts with a teacher / student relationship, evolves into a master / apprentice relationship, and eventually stabilizes into a supporting relationship.
Each implementation project starts with training. LabWare offers a weeklong training program that is attended by all team members who will participate in the configuration work. The implementation then continues under the technical leadership of one of our certified implementation consultants. During this phase the team members receive on-the-job, hands-on training. Over time, usually in the second month, the team members start to feel comfortable with the tools and are ready to take on some of the configuration tasks. Our consultant mentors the team while continuing to tackle some of the more complex parts of the implementation. This relationship continues until the customer is ready to move the LIMS into production. By that time, the customer has become self-supporting and may need relatively little on-site consulting. LabWare continues to support the customer with online information, an email discussion forum, and assistance from our technical support staff via the telephone or if the customer prefers via email.
Our Methodology
LIMS is a significant investment. An organization that is implementing LIMS would like to have assurance of a good return on its investment. A successful LIMS should:
- Deliver significant and measurable benefits to the organization
- Be implemented quickly with minimal cost, disruption and utilization of scarce lab resources
- Gain wide user support, utilization and praise
- Prove its ability to support new business needs easily
- Pass all necessary regulatory inspections
How does one deliver such a system? Based on work with many major international customers, LabWare has developed a remarkably successful and proven solution that we call Goal Oriented LIMS Delivery (GOLD). GOLD takes the best ideas from the IT industry and applies them to LIMS. It embraces effective project management techniques that fully utilize an evolutionary, participatory approach while maintaining tight time scales and regulatory compliance.
The classical waterfall model of writing detailed requirements and functional specifications before performing any configuration is inappropriate for package based information systems where the users need to interact with the system to understand what functions and features are available. LabWare's goal oriented, iterative approach is a far more efficient way of delivering business systems. Our approach is based on high productivity tools, clear objectives, and small, very skilled teams. GOLD has been developed using the experience of hundreds of successful LIMS projects.
LabWare’s Template Solutions
LabWare offers a comprehensive suite of Template Solutions that may be used by customers to enhance their implementation experience. LabWare LIMS can be adapted to deliver nearly any functional behavior common to a typical laboratory environment. With all of the experience that we've had over the course of hundreds of successful implementations, we realized that we could provide great value to customers by translating that knowledge into already-configured functions common to certain market segments for to customers to utilize in their projects.
That's the concept behind the Template Solution. Instead of hard-coding a "dictionary" of industry-specific business logic that would tie customers into our vision of how they should automate their processes, we've created an off-the-shelf set of pre-configured behaviors that our new customers can use as a basis for setting up their own unique systems. Each of our industry-specific Template Solutions represents many man-years of input from LabWare implementation consultants who specialize in LabWare LIMS implementations and have highly specialized domain expertise.
Each Template Solution provides a best practices model for automating many of the more complex workflows that we routinely encounter when implementing LabWare LIMS, and their use has the effect of reducing the overall duration and cost of your project. Template Solutions are now available for the following domains: Pharmaceuticals, Environmental Testing, Contract Labs, Forensics, Chemical/Petrochemical Process, Public Health, and Biorepositories. |