Elevating the Role of Laboratory Informatics to Assist Mission Critical Decision Making in the Enterprise

One of the key challenges faced by life science companies today is the inability to turn the vast amount of laboratory data generated into useful information that enables management at all levels of the organisation to make timely and effective decisions. With multiple applications across the enterprise generating reams of data that sit in separate silos, aggregating and mining this data is a very real and complex problem. Many companies still use manual processes for collecting, analysing and reporting this data; oftentimes the reports that distil this mountain of data into relevant information are extremely tedious to create, taking scientists away from the work of science and thereby losing time and money performing administrative report generation instead of furthering the scientific work of the lab. And because data formats and applications are inconsistent and not well integrated, there has been no coherent way for scientists to aggregate all of their work in one place. All of these are barriers to making effective business decisions.

As life science laboratories look to streamline the flow of information, living with multiple disparate systems with minimal to no integration is no longer an option. Thermo Fisher Scientific’s long standing commercial
partnerships enable us to develop strategies that reflect the real needs of complex businesses today, and we are working with our customers to elevate the role of the laboratory into the stream of the enterprise decision making process. We are engaging with our customers to facilitate management level discussions about the necessity of integrating all of the sources of potential data, including laboratory instrumentation, informatics software like LIMS, CDS and ELN, enterprise systems like MES, PIMS and ERP, enterprise communications tools like SharePoint, BizTalk or document management systems like NextDocs and Documentum, thereby elevating the role of the laboratory in the day-to-day mission critical decisions required of management throughout the enterprise. Integrating the enterprise will facilitate better planning, data quality, collaboration, and end-to-end report generation, all with the goal of providing management dashboard views of key business metrics that are essential to effectively run their operations. This means that management will have the critical data they need before, not after, any point of crisis and it also means early insight into how drugs or compounds are progressing in the pipeline on a routine basis. Thermo Informatics.