Template:LIMS Buyer’s Guide for Cannabis Testing Laboratories/LIMS acquisition, implementation, and support/Business considerations

4. LIMS acquisition, implementation, and support

So you've looked at what adding a laboratory informatics solution to your cannabis testing laboratory can do for you and your workflow, and you're now considering a laboratory information management system (LIMS) for your lab. This can be an intimidating step, particularly if you have little in the way of in-house expertise in integrating informatics into the lab. How expensive will it be? What are the differences between adding an on-premises solution vs. a cloud solution? How difficult will it be to learn the system? What if the implementation goes wrong, costing even more? Will we really see any added benefit to adding a LIMS to the lab? These and other questions may fearfully get asked as you and your team venture forth into unfamiliar territory. However, know that you won't be the first lab to take this step, and you won't be the last. Stable LIMS vendors with personnel representing decades of experience have assisted labs of all types with these and other questions time and time again, and the best vendors will have the added industry-specific experience to understand and tailor LIMS selection and implementation to the nuances of your lab.

That said, you won't be relying solely on a vendor to walk you through every step of the process. The cannabis testing industry inevitably places demands on the laboratory manager and its staff to know and follow the standards, regulations, and accreditation procedures associated with the industry. Your lab should have already met or is on the way to meeting those demands, nearly set to take on new challenges, including integrating a LIMS into your lab's workflow. While the vendor and related consultants can provide vital help in the overall process, a chunk of the onus will fall on you and your team. That means understanding your business' mission, goals, budget, in-house knowledge, and procedures, as well as basic information about software acquisition, implementation, and maintenance, both short- and long-term. And, of course, you'll want to know more about the significant vendors providing clear information about how their LIMS meets the needs of a cannabis testing lab. This is often achieved by either contacting vendors directly and asking for details, or by submitting a request for information (RFI; more on that later) that attempts to draw in vendors to respond with more information about their LIMS and how it solves your lab's problems. This chapter will help guide you on that journey.

4.1 Business considerations

Before contacting LIMS vendors, your lab should first be considering a few business matters and asking important questions about how to approach LIMS acquisition. A natural starting point is reviewing the lab's overall mission statement and business goals. How does acquiring or upgrading a LIMS help accomplish the mission and goals? As we'll see in the next section, a well-implemented LIMS provides many benefits, including improving accuracy, quality, and security of laboratory data and workflows. Your business' mission and goals likely already enshrine some of those ideals. Beyond that, your lab's acquisition team should make a few additional considerations before contacting LIMS vendors.

1. Acquisition and long-term maintenance budget: Your lab's budget is, by all rights, a huge consideration when shopping for a new or replacement cannabis testing LIMS. That budget is driven by a number of factors, some of them perhaps out of the acquisition manager's control. At the heart of budgeting for a LIMS, however, will be two questions: what do you need the LIMS to do, and how many users will be simultaneously logged into the system? These two critical factors are addressed in the next section about acquisition and licensing. Yet other questions may also need to be asked. Does the budget take into account long-term maintenance and support for the system? If you'll be hosting it locally, will you have the budget for IT support and hardware? What sort of training and data migration costs do you anticipate? This is all to say that an initial budget figure may not do justice to the realities of your situation. Some preliminary scouting of the differences between a self-hosted, license-based LIMS and a cloud-hosted, software as a service (SaaS) LIMS in relation to your current IT infrastructure and staff knowledge may be required, as well as deeper considerations into the long-term costs of system ownership.

2. Diversification of testing services: Previously discussed in Chapter 3, be sure to address how diversified your offered services are or may eventually be. If you are an existing lab working with environmental testing, for example, does your current laboratory informatics system have the flexibility to add cannabis-related tests, protocols, and workflows? Will you be doing the footwork to add them, or will the vendor of your system support you in that effort? If you're a start-up, will your lab be focusing solely on cannabis testing and expand into other markets later, or will your test menu be broader? In most of these cases, you'll be desiring a LIMS that is flexible enough to allow for not only the testing of cannabis materials with ease, but also the expansion of your testing services into other markets as painlessly as possible. Having the ability to create and customize sample registration screens, test protocols, labels, reports, specification limit sets, measurement units, and substrates/matrices while being able to interface with practically most any instrument and software system required will go a long way towards making your multi-market workflows run as smooth as silk.

3. In-house knowledge: Your lab will want to consider what in-house knowledge and experience exists concerning how laboratory informatics fits into your cannabis testing lab. Does your lab have any personnel with direct experience implementing a data management system on local hardware? In the cloud? What about configuring software to match your workflows? Some labs may find they have a wealth of analytical knowledge and experience in the lab, but not a whole lot of practical informatics experience. This lack of informatics knowledge can be made up partially by choosing a quality vendor willing to patiently work with you and your designated personnel to get it right. However, it'll be your responsibility to confirm how much hand-holding the vendor will do, and what experiences they have with prior clients. (You may want to ask potential vendors for reference clients you can speak with to gain their feedback on the implementation experience.) In some cases, it may even make sense to consider working temporarily with an informatics consultant well versed in the industry. (See Chapter 6 for some representative examples of such consultants.)

4. In-house buy-in of LIMS adoption: Ensure executive management is fully on-board with LIMS acquisition and use, as well as any reasons given for how the LIMS will support the lab's stated mission and goals. Like a commitment to cybersecurity, a laboratory that has leadership buy-in of a business goal-supported information management system will find it easier to "institutionalize" its adoption and use as a priority, as well as receive financial support for the system and its maintenance. And if employees see strong buy-in from leadership, they may be more inclined to put in the effort to learn how to use the system and use it to its fullest potential.

5. Pre-planning for vendor interaction: Pre-plan what your approach to any vendor you talk with will be. Determine what important questions should be asked both internally and with each and every vendor you make first contact with. Does the vendor communicate clearly, listen to what you have to say, and give you an opportunity to ask questions? What are their contract procedures, and does a given contract provide a clear upgrade path in the future? How strong is the vendor's short- and long-term product roadmap, and does it match with your long-term goals? Can the vendor complete a security audit of the solution? Will the vendor give you a full-feature demonstration of the software using data similar to your cannabis testing business? Is the vendor open to providing active client references for you to to contact? How ready is the vendor to respond to regulatory changes that affect the use of their cannabis testing solution?