LINKING THE LAB into open systems
15 Jan 2000
As product launches go, LabSystems' recent unveiling of its new chromatography data system (CDS) had a certain appeal. Call a product Atlas, take it to the Atlas mountains in Morocco to show it off, and you're halfway to a successful launch from the start. But LabSystems could fairly claim that it was well over halfway there 18 months ago when it began to develop the CDS software in partnership with major customers from the pharmaceutical industry.
Getting the input of chromatographers, chemists and plant IT teams at that early stage was crucial to the Atlas development. Much of LabSystems' business is at the 'high end' of laboratory automation, where it claims a market leadership in LIMS (laboratory information management systems) and CDS (chromatography data systems). But unlike its main competitors, whose main business is the supply of analytical instrumentation, the company is only involved in information systems. So, asking end users exactly what they wanted from such a system was an exercise in openness, without any of the constraints of being a proprietary equipment vendor.
Those users from the likes of DuPont-Merck, Glaxo Wellcome, Zeneca and Rhone-Poulenc Rorer became part of LabSystems' Joint Application Development (JAD) process, and were committed to nominating teams to spend at least 60 per cent of their time on the Atlas project. That might seem an over-commitment between customer and supplier, but all the companies are existing users of LabSystems' products and will be the first to take delivery of Atlas on a free upgrade. With that in mind, it was in everyone's interest to get the development right first time.
As the make-up of its JAD teams demonstrates, LabSystems focuses on what it calls the 'big' systems market multiple users of multiple instruments, networked in a secure, regulated and validated operating environment. According to md Gordon Logan, 'around 60 per cent of all analytical instruments are chromatographs. The market for chromatography data systems is worth some $300 million and growing at between 9 and 11 per cent a year.' LabSystems alone has some 16 000 chromatography channels connected to its systems around the world, representing a total pool of around 40 000 users.
Now you might think that this could mean 40 000 opinions as to what a CDS should be, but fortunately the technique of chromatography is largely independent of industry sector, so LabSystems was happy to concentrate initially on the pharmaceuticals sector, whose key requirements such as security and validation are fundamental and needed building into Atlas.
Equally fundamental is the platform that Atlas runs on. Users worldwide have now accepted Windows 95 and Windows NT as de facto industry standards and so LabSystems has given Atlas the complete 'look and feel' of Microsoft Office. Anyone familiar with Word and Excel can have Atlas up and running in next to no time, moving data and results from the CDS into other applications as they would with any other OLE-supported package.
