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Ways to accomplish customer-specific changes and their accompanying cost-of-ownership implications
LIMS is a mature market where commercial systems have been available for about 20 years, and clientserver UMS have been on the market for nearly 10 years. Many companies are on their third generation of LIMS projects - most from multiple vendors. Why do companies replace UMS? The answer is typically one of the following:
* The old LIMS was not flexible enough to satisfy current business needs
* Upgrading the old LUMS was as difficult as installing a new one
* Supporting the old LIMS became very difficult.
A key question is why does this happen? The answer is that LIMS are highly-tailored systems.
Except for very specific special applications, no UMS is ready to run out-of-the-box. Of course, user accounts and product specifications must be set up; but that's not the point. Every LIMS project requires customer-specific changes to fit the working practices of the laboratory and the business. The purpose of this article is to delve into the subject of how these changes are accomplished, and the concomitant cost-of-ownership implications.
There are two schools of thought regarding the way to adapt a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) LIMS to meet the needs of the business: Configuration and Customization. The Configurationbased approach revolves around the idea that the LIMS product contains all the necessary functioning capability, and it needs to be enabled in some manner that does not involve changing the product's source code. On the other hand, Customization does involve changing the product's source code, either directly, or by adding "extensions" that directly manipulate the LIMS data.This definition of customization is independent of whether the customer or the vendor makes the code modifications.
Comparing the two approaches to determine which is better is not clear-cut because it depends on several factors. Intuitively, configurable systems should be better...