Get lab instrument integration right with a business-centric approach

Integrating laboratory instruments with LIMS, ELN or other scientific execution platforms is essential if you want to eliminate manual processes, share data and improve efficiency. But if you have too narrow a focus and one-sided competencies, it can cause missed opportunities or hinder efficient maintenance and scalability of integrations. NNIT’s approach ensures a holistic view that uses integration as levers to improve your business processes.

Most life sciences laboratory equipment, from simple scales and pH meters to application-specific instruments like High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC), can be integrated with the Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS), Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELN), or other platforms.

Integration ensures that all your data is accurately recorded, analyzed, and shared, thereby supporting the workflows in your wet labs. This can greatly improve both your efficiency and data integrity by removing manual processes, reducing the risk of errors and automating workflows.

However, all too often, integration is handled as individual case-by-case projects with a one-sided focus on just one part of the integration, such as the LIMS or ELN.

A one-sided approach limits the development competencies that are available, and you risk neglecting potential opportunities, like optimizing the source systems or delivering a scalable and maintainable architecture using middleware. This creates scalability issues and hinders efficient upkeep.

If your ambition is to achieve a semi-automated or fully automated lab, the complexity rises exponentially. You face greater requirements for orchestrating people and machines and the needs for integrations increase proportionally, putting the maintainability of point-to-point integrations at risk.

To unlock the full potential of your wet lab, you must approach the integration of the instruments and related applications with consideration for the larger picture. This includes the entire laboratory and technology ecosystem: the business processes, people and material workflows, data flows, source systems, end systems and middleware.

You also need to consider the integration and connectivity capabilities of your systems, IT network and security, and middleware technologies supporting connectivity protocols and data transformations.

NNIT’s solutions for lab instrument integration

At NNIT, we enable you to get lab instrument integration right. Our services deliver the knowledge and competencies required to initiate, plan and deliver on integration projects in a way that provides maximum benefits.

Advisory and execution services

We provide expert advice and direct assistance for the full lifecycle of laboratory digitalization, from initial analysis and planning to final validation and release.

Together, we identify the potential benefits for your organization and design a solution that supports your process flows, business priorities, and regulatory requirements.

You'll get expert support to identify integration benefits, tailor methodologies, and design solutions with clear process flows and documentation. From implementation and system changes to acceptance testing and operational handover, you’ll have everything needed for a seamless, scalable and compliant integration.

How we work

Based on our many years of experience working with life sciences laboratories, we have developed a unique approach for integrating lab instruments. It broadens the focus beyond the technical specifications, system compatibility and the data that need to be shared. Instead, we take a holistic view that encompasses your entire lab ecosystem, identifies all needed capabilities and greatly reduces the risk of a biased approach to solution design.

Our way ensures that the selection of integration approach and specific solution is aligned with digital maturity and ambition of the organization and suitable to achieve your desired business process optimization. To support this, we perform an analysis of potential benefits and improvements before defining the technical solution.

Additionally, we approach integration solution architecture as a multi-dimensional and multi-objective design challenge where workflows, instrument applications, lab applications, and middleware are all levers to achieve an integration design that is fit for purpose, maintainable and scalable.

To do so, we bring the necessary pallet of knowledge about business processes, source and end systems, IT architecture, network and integration platforms and middleware expertise to each project.

Finally, we bring a people- and business process centric approach to make sure we always maintain the right perspective. It significantly reduces the risk of designing solutions that create unforeseen problems over time or in other parts of the business.

Through iterations, we carefully maintain the balance between people and business goals on one side and software, hardware, and data standards on the other. This process is guided by our methodology , which lays out each step in detail, from scoping to validation and release.

Why NNIT

Because we are born out of the life sciences industry, pharmaceutical manufacturing and GxP requirements are part of our DNA. Over more than four decades, we have built both the experience and the technology expertise to be a unique IT partner for life sciences organizations.

Our deep domain expertise is backed by a global organization that can match your needs and expectations regardless of your company’s size, location, or business focus.

Contact us today and find out what the right kind of lab instrument integration can do for your business.