What is a KPI?

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the critical indicators that show progress against an organization’s objectives and goals. They measure success and help drive informed business decisions.

If you can’t measure your metrics, you cannot monitor your progress against your goals. They need to be measured to obtain visibility and identify variances to control a process.

KPIs in the lab vary greatly depending on the industry or your lab type, but no matter the industry, KPIs provide direct insight into lab operations to ensure that the lab is running smoothly. Alternatively, routine monitoring of your KPIs can also quickly identify areas that need improvement. They can also highlight process improvement and training opportunities.

What makes a good KPI?

The five steps towards establishing vital KPIs can be defined under the SMART principles:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-based

Define precisely what you want to achieve, when, and how success will be measured.

Why are KPIs important in the lab?

Setting vital KPIs can help you measure the impact of your efforts. When setting KPIs, it’s essential to define what you want to achieve, when, and how success will be measured. To ensure that your KPIs are effective, several vital questions need to be answered:

Firstly, is the KPI connected to the business goal? Business goals should act as a roadmap for all decisions made within the company. If your KPI does not tie directly into these goals, it may not impact the organization’s overall success. It is also essential to ensure that company leaders agree with the KPIs – this helps ensure everyone is working towards one unified set of objectives.

Secondly, the KPIs must be easy to define and understand. If stakeholders know what they’re meant to be measuring, it will be easier for them to contribute towards achieving these targets. It is also essential that these objectives can be quantified easily – if you’re unable to track progress, you won’t be able to assess how successfully you have achieved them.

Finally, it’s crucial that your KPIs drive change. They should focus on outcomes rather than inputs – this means setting objectives related to measurable results, such as the number of new products launched on time for a Product Development lab or cycle time/number of reworks for a QC lab rather than activities like attending meetings or completion of tasks. This way, you’ll be able to track whether or not the changes made overall impact performance.

When setting KPIs, it is essential to ensure they meet specific criteria to have a meaningful impact on business goals and performance. Key points include ensuring they are aligned with the company’s business goals, being easily understandable and quantifiable, and driving change by focusing on outcomes rather than inputs.

KPIs also need to be communicated effectively within the organization for everyone involved in achieving them to be clear on expectations and able to work together towards achieving them. Establishing transparency around progress towards KPIs utilizing tools such as LabWare LIMS dashboards and reporting tools helps ensure that everybody is working towards similar objectives. Regularly discussing progress can also create a sense of accountability within the team and help keep everyone motivated. After all, if people don’t understand how their work contributes towards organizational goals, then it’s unlikely they will stay engaged with them long-term.

How many KPIs should you track?

Regarding tracking KPIs, “the critical few” is the best approach. This means picking two or three KPIs per goal – no more, no less – and constantly monitoring them over time. This allows you to quickly identify trends and plan accordingly while avoiding analysis paralysis or wasting valuable time on metrics that aren’t useful in the end.

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” – Albert Einstein

When choosing which KPIs to track, focus on those that provide meaningful insights rather than simply counting measures with no real context behind them. The goal should always be finding metrics that will tell you something new about your business rather than merely providing numbers without any real value added by measuring them in the first place.

Common mistakes in setting effective KPIs:

• Measuring too much
• Measuring the wrong thing or one type of metric
• Measuring the KPIs you’ve always measured
• Only measuring the easy things
• Ignoring or not using the data
• Averages may lie

What’s important to remember is that not all KPIs are created equal. Choosing ones that accurately reflect what you’re trying to measure and give you an accurate picture of your company’s performance is essential. To do this, start by brainstorming which goals need to be tracked and then map out how each KPI will help you meet them. Make sure each one has a clear purpose before settling on it for long-term monitoring.

How can LabWare LIMS improve KPI reporting?

The most common way of measuring KPIs is through dashboards and reports. Dashboard reporting allows managers to assess their team’s performance quickly, while detailed reports provide more in-depth analysis. Utilizing both sets of data helps managers make informed decisions about their organization’s future direction and strategies.

LabWare LIMS offers customizable dashboards that present data in an easy-to-understand format and allows users to monitor their KPIs in real time. The platform also includes advanced features such as Crystal reports which can be customized and scheduled for automatic generation and email notifications regarding KPI progress updates. On top of this, all of the necessary objects and tools for building visual workflows that link data to KPIs on demand are included with LabWare LIMS.

Summary

Having good KPIs and monitoring them regularly will help the lab keep running efficiently by providing the ability to track progress and make improvements quickly. It’s also important to remember that your goals change over time, and so should your KPIs. Review your goals and KPIs as the business needs change and update them accordingly.

LabWare LIMS KPI dashboards offer clear visibility into current performance so lab teams can quickly identify opportunities for improvement or take corrective action when necessary. These dashboards allow users to customize their data display to focus on the most essential metrics so they can quickly identify trends and bottlenecks in sample processing time. These real-time metrics allow labs to monitor their performance and adjust as needed based on what they learn from the data. These tools, when appropriately configured, guarantee greater accuracy in measuring performance—laying out clear steps for continuous improvement within any modern laboratory setting today!

Why It Matters to You

The benefits of using KPIs are many: they allow businesses to identify areas where they could improve their operations; establish benchmarks for measuring progress towards strategic objectives; identify new growth opportunities, and provide visibility into overall organizational performance.

In this blog, we discuss how:

• LabWare LIMS KPI dashboards can offer clear visibility into current performance, allowing lab teams to quickly identify opportunities for improvement or take corrective action when necessary.
• These dashboards allow users to customize their data display to focus on the most essential to identify trends and bottlenecks in sample processing time quickly.
• These real-time metrics allow labs to constantly monitor their performance and adjust as needed based on what they learn from the data.

About Astrix

Astrix is the unrivaled market leader in creating & delivering innovative strategies, solutions, and people to the life science community. Through world-class people, process, and technology, we work with clients to fundamentally improve business & scientific outcomes and the quality of life everywhere. Founded by scientists to solve the unique challenges of the life science community, Astrix offers a growing array of strategic, technical, and staffing services designed to deliver value to clients across their organizations. To learn the latest about how Astrix is transforming the way science-based businesses succeed today, visit www.astrixinc.com.

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While LabWare’s ELP offers both functionality and business benefits significantly beyond what is provided by a conventional LIMS or ELN, there are important considerations to take into account when implementing or upgrading the LabWare solution in order to realize its full potential to transform your laboratory operations. In this blog, we’ll discuss key best practice recommendations to follow during your LabWare implementation or upgrade that will help to ensure your project is successful in optimizing compliance, improving quality, reducing costs, and increasing productivity and innovation in your laboratory environment.

Tips for Optimizing LabWare Implementations or Upgrades

Some important considerations to take into account when implementing or upgrading LabWare’s Enterprise Laboratory Platform (ELP) include:

Make Good Architecture Decisions. When designing your LabWare system architecture, it is wise to use as much of the standard configuration as possible, which means getting the best Templates that will suit your business, and trying to use as many of the available modules as possible to avoid a lot of customizations. There are a number of reasons for this:

• Using LIMS Basic (LabWare programming language used for customizations) instead of standard functionalities means that LabWare will need to compile your customizations in real-time, resulting in a loss of performance.
• The more customizations you have, the more complex future upgrades will be.
• The more customizations you have, the more difficult it will be for your IT support to solve an issue when problems arise.

Iterate Your Implementation. The LabWare platform is extremely flexible and can be configured and customized to automate virtually any laboratory operation. However, just because you can do something does not mean it is cost or time effective to do so. It is prudent to implement LabWare in stages, with the first iteration being the minimum viable solution to go into production with. Once this minimum solution is operational, users can provide feedback as to the pain points that they are experiencing, and then decisions can be made as to whether it makes sense from a financial and time perspective to customize the system to provide further automation.

Have a Master Data Management Strategy. Having a data management strategy is often an afterthought in an informatics project. Data management for any informatics implementation almost always turns out to be a much bigger task than one might have imagined, especially for those projects that involve replacing a legacy system. As much of LabWare’s functionality is data and template driven, neglecting to formulate a Master Data Management Strategy at the beginning of the project can lead to significant time and cost overruns as the project proceeds. As such, it is important to make sure that you do the work necessary to understand and plan for your static data requirements at the beginning of your LabWare project. Questions to ask include: How are we going to get data out of the legacy system and into LabWare? How are we going to harmonize data across multiple sites?

Understand User Roles and Security Permissions. LabWare has a multi-layered security framework built into the system. To fully utilize this feature, it is important to fully detail the desired user roles and the permissions associated with each role before you build the system. As with managing the static data aspects of the project, designing and implementing user permission layers can be a bigger task than expected. Waiting until the end of the project to implement a security framework is a recipe for cost and time overruns.

Don’t Go Overboard With Instrument Integration. LabWare offers several different ways to integrate instruments into the system.

• Configuring Labware to monitor and process database tables created by an external instrument.
• Web services
• XML data mapped to specific fields in Labware, or to an XSD provided by external applications. LabWare now supports the AniML XML standard for analytical chemistry data, allowing LabWare to more easily bring in data from various sources.
• Direct connection via RS-232 ports.
• Modules that support various complex laboratory instrument systems like Empower CDS.

With all these integration options, it is certainly possible to get bogged down in trying to integrate too much too soon. Some instrument integrations can be challenging and cause project delays. It is important to have a master plan that details what instruments are to be integrated and when.

Have a System Map That Details All the Templates and Modules in Use. Modules in LabWare are enhancements that are incorporated into the main application using its core language (Small Talk). These modules can be downloaded from the LabWare website and installed with the main application to achieve a new feature. It is quite common for complex LabWare implementations to have a large number of modules installed. When a customer downloads a new module that has been developed by the Labware team, it may cause some problems in other modules that they are using. This issue usually occurs in a new implementation, when adding new features into an existing implementation or when upgrading the core system version. Its therefore important to have a map of all the modules installed in your server and clients, as well as the industry template being used, so that the support team will have all the information they need to recreate the customer’s installation in a sandbox where they will try to reproduce the error.

Only People with the Correct Skills Should Program Customizations. Anyone who has taken the LIMS Basic (LabWare programing language for customization) training can start developing their codes to customize LabWare. However, there are some risks when you do not have the right people doing the work. In the past, many common mistakes made in LIMS Basic programing (e.g. not using quotation marks with a string definition) were skipped by the compiler and fixed during execution time. The compiler is in constant development by LabWare, however. LabWare 7 removed much of these automatic fixing to increase the performance of the system, resulting in a big problem for many companies when trying to upgrade.

Astrix provides a complete solution for LabWare Implementation and  Platform Upgrades.

Conclusion

LabWare’s ELP, which combines the functionality of LIMS and Electronic Laboratory Notebook into a single integrated solution, is unique in the informatics industry. This system offers the ability to automate virtually any laboratory workflow. While the potential for this system to help increase productivity and innovation in your laboratory environment is great, it is important to work with a quality laboratory informatics consultant who has the necessary experience with LabWare in order to realize its full potential.

About Astrix

Astrix  is an informatics consulting, professional services and staffing company dedicated to servicing the scientific community for over 20 years.  We shape our clients’ future, combining deep scientific insight with the understanding of how technology and people will impact the scientific industries. Our focus on issues related to value engineered solutions, on demand resource and domain requirements, flexible and scalable operating and business models helps our clients find future value and growth in scientific domains. Whether focused on strategies for Laboratories, IT or Staffing, Astrix has the people, skills and experience to effectively shape client value. We offer highly objective points of view on Enterprise Informatics, Laboratory Operations, Healthcare IT and Scientific Staffing with an emphasis on business and technology, leveraging our deep industry experience.

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As much of LabWare’s functionality is data and template driven, the design and configuration of the master data (static data objects that are agreed upon and shared across the enterprise) is the most important aspect of any LabWare system. For both the initial implementation and ongoing activities, master data configuration has a dramatic impact on scalability and system maintenance activities. In this blog, we present a number of tips for master data configuration that will help to keep the core of your implementation solid and help to ensure that the system delivers a superior return on investment (ROI) over its lifetime for your organization.

Tips for Master Data Configuration in LabWare

Formulate a Master Data Management Strategy. Having a master data management strategy is frequently an afterthought in an informatics project. Yet, data management for any informatics implementation almost always turns out to be a much bigger task than one might have imagined, especially for those projects that involve replacing a legacy system. Neglecting to formulate a Master Data Management Strategy at the beginning of the project can lead to much frustration and system re-work in subsequent phases, not to mention time and cost overruns. It is important to take the time to understand all the various data elements and how they interact and plan for static data requirements before you begin the implementation.

Stay as close to out of the box (OOB) functionality as possible. Customization, especially table and field customization, can have an enormous impact on system maintenance down the road for several reasons:

• There is much more vendor support for issues related to the core system.
• Every new feature must take into account any aspects of the system that were previously customized.
• Any data entry and/or data migration plan must also consider customized fields.

Almost every organization has to customize, but by keeping it to a minimum, your cost of ownership will be much lower. When customization is necessary, make sure it is properly designed and as well documented as possible.

Take the time to understand the E-Sig’s rules and events configuration. Labware has an array of configuration options for e-signature rules, making the system very flexible. Since Data Integrity and overall system compliance are strongly tied to e-signatures and audit trails, it is important to develop the expertise to ensure you use the flexibility to your advantage:

• A misconfigured rule could lead to a missing e-signature prompt or an unnecessary prompt
• Combining multiple rows of rules into a single rule can reduce validation time.

The bottom line is that, while configuration of rules and events can be tricky, knowledgeable expertise can increase both laboratory compliance and efficiency.

Understand the Analysis Variation. Labware’s Analysis Variation feature can be very powerful and make your system scalable if done properly. Using variations simplifies and allows for better external interfacing. For example, if the external system has one analysis entry but Labware contains 4 similarly named analyses, the complexity of mapping relevant values between the two systems can become prohibitive.

In addition, using Analysis Variations as opposed to additional analyses with similar names will allow for better trending and reporting. Report queries are more efficient at searching for specific analysis and parsing variations than using wildcards for alternate analysis naming conventions.

Keep Naming Conventions Internal to Labware. Objects and code in a Labware implementation are often named to mirror an external system such as EMPOWER, Trackwise, etc. While this method can provide some benefits (e.g. linking references in documentation), if the external system is changed, all of the Labware objects that link to that system will need to be updated. Naming conventions can lead to problems down the road if external factors aren’t considered.

Conclusion

Finding the right balance when configuring your master data in LabWare is the key to having a scalable system that is easy to maintain. The factors presented above are just a few of those necessary to take into account for effective master data design in LabWare.

The Astrix Team has the industry knowledge and extensive experience with LabWare to help you successfully implement, optimize or upgrade a LabWare system. Whether you are upgrading your LabWare system, looking to optimize your current LabWare implementation, or replacing your current system with LabWare, our consistent yet customizable Astrix Approach will help you get the most from LabWare.

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