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STARLIMS Cost Benefits – The Dutch

Perspective

In a Project initiated by the Dutch Magazine Chemisch Weekblad , Freek Rooze of ISYS Marketing interviews Seven Dutch laboratories on their experiences with STARLIMS from the cost benefit point of view. In a phone interview with lab executives Mr. Rooze verifies improvements in productivity, quality, tracking, planning, customer orientation, reporting, control and especially efficiency.

Man-Years

The most important task of the Plant Protection Service in Wageningen, an agency of the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature Management and Fisheries, is the control and suppression of diseases and pests that affect agriculture, horticulture and green space. Here, STARLIMS software is used for recording data related to the inspections of plant material in the Netherlands, or import and export data, as well as for recording diagnostic data for various research groups. The purchase of the LIMS involved more than a million guilders.

Gert Romeijn, responsible for the technical state of affairs surrounding last year’s investment, said, “Our objective was to find an effective way to process our enormous increase in samples. A few years ago, we were handling about 4000 samples a year. Now, we’re handling about 100,000. Meanwhile, the number of staff in our group has been reduced from 40 to 30. For a whole season, we made a comparison between the previous method of working and the new procedures. As a result, I think actual savings amounts to two man-years plus a saving in the extra costs generated from the errors involved in the previous method and the long time it took to produce management information. My own job is completely devoted to maintaining the system and adjusting the LIMS to our own activities. Fortunately, this is fairly easy to do. We think system flexibility is important because you can make modifications here easier, than you can to adjusting your operating processes. How to express this monetarily, however, is hard to say.”

 We heard a similar story when we spoke with Mr. Oscar Schoof at Omegam, an environmental studies laboratory for the city of Amsterdam. This laboratory’s LIMS has been in operation for more than two years now and according to Schoof, the lab’s efficiency continues to increase. “People in the laboratory know that it’s possible to make changes in the system, so practically everyone is trying to improve their work by using it. Changes occur continuously, and since I’m in charge of the technical support, I’m involved in this. A LIMS is never finished. It can always be changed and improved. Our lab’s productivity has definitely increased, and our reporting is also better and quicker. The savings this provides in terms of time, however, is hard to quantify. What’s more however, it’s now easier for our customers to access their results over the Internet, and the specimen coordination department can now react faster to customer demands.”

Audits

 Ronald Denkelaar works at EPZ, an electricity production company. “Even when our lab still consisted of eight people back in 1975, we already had our own self-made LIMS operating on a PDP-11. So we’ve accumulated years of experience with a LIMS. The LIMS we have now had has been in operation here for about four years. Our most important goal in terms of running a LIMS is obtaining clarity and preventing errors – and we’re reaching this goal. As EPZ manages a nuclear power plant, the government closely controls our activities. Since the nuclear physics agency conducts audits here on a regular basis, we have a strict schedule of controls and system calibrations that are sent to employees by means of automatically generated work lists. Even though there have been no changes in the number of personnel that could be attributed to the LIMS, you could still say that our efficiency of trend analyses has increased. It’s now possible to get insight into all kinds of findings much faster, and carrying out trend analyses is extremely simple. My work with STARLIMS takes up about 3 to 4 hours of my workday. This involves maintenance and adding applications such as the link to a gamma spectrometer in which the data is provided in exponential powers. Fortunately, the system is so flexible that this is actually possible, and that’s not always the case.”

Customer Orientation

The objectives at COKZ, the Netherlands Controlling Authority for Milk and Milk Products was to reduce administrative activities. According to Hein Valenberg, this goal has been amply reached over the six years that his organization has been working with STARLIMS. Once the system was purchased, the number of analyses increased, particularly in regard to the complexity of the research programs. Although the number of employees has not been cut, the staff would not have been able to take on such a workload without STARLIMS. In addition, customer satisfaction has improved by allowing the organization to react faster to customer demands, the organization’s reporting is accomplished quicker, and its professional image has improved. What’s more, STARLIMS provides better insight into processes, and management information is easier to obtain. As an extra, chemical management is provided by the LIMS. According to Valenberg, a good example of savings that can’t be quantified, involves the added results due to the expansion of COKZ’s research programs. This was accomplished simply by modifying the LIMS, thus eliminating other radical changes.

Tracking

Analytico in Barneveld is primarily engaged in standard environmental analyses. “Our objectives,” says Alwies Klunder, system manager, “were both an improvement in efficiency and in quality. The STARLIMS system is doing a great job on reaching these objectives. Before you purchase a system, you have to have a good idea of what your organization does. Even so, you have to keep on making adjustments in the system. In our case, growth required changes, to one degree or another in almost all of our processes. Less preliminary treatment is being performed, and new equipment has been added. We now have 120 people working in the lab and we’ve increased our number of analyses to 180,000 a year, as well as our number of reports to 200 a day. The number of samples in our warehouse has now grown to an average of 100,000. Nevertheless, everything can be tracked, and we’ve hardly ever lost an actual specimen. STARLIMS controls our entire process, thus making work lists unnecessary. A specimen goes from one workplace to the next with labels to ensure that people know what has to be done and how fast it has to get done. The tools of the LIMS we now have give us the kind of flexibility we need and have been adjusted to what our organization requires. It has made a difference, amounting to at least two FTEs.  More importantly, is the fact that if we removed the LIMS now, we’d have to hire so many people we’d probably go bankrupt.”

Central Database

At WLO Onderzoek en Advies in Doetinchem, a research laboratory for drinking water, people mention a “profit” of one to two FTEs and that their LIMS paid for itself within three to four years. Here again, the company has had to deal with many changes: three years ago, it was involved in a merger, and the government, also introduced a new water supply decree. Due to the hoof and mouth crisis, the number of samples to be processed within a short time simply exploded. Mr Wüstman, head of the organic analysis department, estimates that capacity has doubled thanks to STARLIMS. Besides this, the quality of the information has definitely increased. Compared to working with sub-systems, the advantage of a central system is that everyone is now looking at the same figures. Customer orientation has improved, as findings can be viewed even before validation and customers can be kept informed by Internet. 

In conclusion, although not all organizations have formulated concrete objectives related to the ROI they would like a LIMS to generate, they are very satisfied with the results they have achieved in productivity, improving quality, tracking, planning, customer relations, reporting, and control by having STARLIMS in operation at their organization.  

This is an edited version of an article published in the Dutch magazine Chemisch Weekblad - December 2001