LIMS are like sausages!
I was talking to an associate the other day and a strange conversation developed around sausages. Personally, I am rather fond of sausages but that is not the point of this blog. This blog is how LIMS are like sausages.
It is really quite simple, you would no more want to eat a plate of raw sausages than you would want to try to use a LIMS that was not configured specifically to your lab and ready to go as a turn-key solution.
Sausages are best served fully cooked. Likewise, a LIMS implementation is considered complete only when all setup of tests, work flows, users, data migrations, instruments, reports and anything else that you can think of, have been configured to your labs needs in order to process samples and produce reports. Also, I would not recommend that you do this configuration by yourself. When you order breakfast, you do not expect to have to go to the kitchen to cook your own food; you expect the food to be fully cooked, prepared and delivered to you ready to eat. You should expect no less from your LIMS implementation.
If you are missing any of these critical ingredients, your LIMS implementation will leave a very bad taste or worse, make you quite ill.
I thought about putting in some pictures for illustration purposes but when I got to looking at the choices, I decided against it since some of you may be eating lunch or breakfast.
Bon Appetite!
