How To Avoid The Top 5 LIMS Nightmares

Traditional Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) implementations are notorious for keeping people awake at night. Industry analysts like Strategic Directions and ARC Advisory Group have estimated the failure rate of commercial LIMS solutions to be as high as 60 percent with many of them failing to deliver original customer requirements after lengthy and expensive deployments. Gartner has also taken a deep dive into the LIMS vortex and reported back that many LIMS engagements come with “bloated costs, poor ROI and excessive effort to make LIMS work for current business processes… they all require a different level of back-end customization and effort,” and “most LIMS vendors oversell what they can confidently deliver.”

Sleep-disturbing LIMS issues include sample-centric technology that inhibits your ability to manage change and organizational complexities, minimal “out-of-the-box” implementation, little integration with lab environment and other IT systems, excessive custom coding required before validation in your cGMP environment, lengthy implementation times and high ongoing total cost of ownership.