Lab Efficiency: Eurofins Scientific's Instrument Management Software

Eurofins Scientific is a group of international life sciences companies with 55,000 staff across a network of more than 1000 independent companies.

Challenge

Eurofins offers a portfolio of over 200,000 analytical methods for evaluating the safety, identity, composition, authenticity, origin, and purity of biological substances and products. They also offer innovative clinical diagnostics. However, the systems they were using for performing lab tests were becoming obsolete. Blome, the system they used for doing lab analysis, was complex to manage and the process of testing the substances was very slow.

Since Eurofins is a very large company with over 900 laboratories around the world, it is very hard to integrate every lab site into the same central testing system. A lot of the time, Eurofins is using small local laboratories as its subsidiaries and provides them with the support they need for operations.

Because of this, some of the local lab sites are still operating on their individual testing systems. This is making communication between the center and local lab sites very complicated and slow.

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Solution

One of the lab sites in France had the initial idea for the new software system for lab testing. However, since software development is not their main area of work, Eurofins was not able to develop it alone.

That is how Eurofins and Enlight Engineering started cooperating.

The solution was to create a new, more sophisticated software system that could be used by any lab site. Lab technicians should be able to use this software system to navigate any lab instrument for performing the tests.

This new software system was named ICRV (Instrument Connect Result Validation) and was partially built on the old system, Blome, by our developers.

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Results / Effects

This new ICRV system brings many advantages compared to the old system:

• It gives the opportunity for the operator to give orders to the lab instruments through the system application
• Test results come out sorted, compared, and nicely displayed so they are easier to interpret.
• It operates much faster. Since performing tests takes less time, the new system can perform a lot more tests for the same amount of time in comparison to the old system.
• It is much easier to integrate it in any lab site than the old system
• It does not leave room for any mistakes

Project Process

ICRV (Instrument Connect Result Validation) System

Since performing different tests requires many different lab instruments that are operating differently, our developers had to make a driver for each of the instruments. They needed to collect all laboratory instrument documentation needed for the driver and integrate them into the ICRV System.

This ICRV System makes testing much easier and faster for the operators. The only thing they must know is on which lab instrument a certain activity should be performed.

ICRV Proxy Service

The ICRV Proxy Service has emerged as a need from the original ICRV project.

Not all local lab sites are included in the central Eurofins testing system, named NG world, which makes it very hard to communicate with them. Since switching to the new ICRV system is very slow due to the size of the company, many lab sites are still operating on the old Blome system.

This means that for the lab sites which are still using Blome, performing tests is much slower. Another disadvantage is that these lab sites cannot use the ICRV system since they are not connected with NG world, and they have only Blome or some local system. There comes the value of the ICRV Proxy Service. It allows these lab sites to use the ICRV system with Blome or their local system.

In order to simplify this communication, our team has developed the ICRV Proxy System which makes it easier for employees in Eurofins to use the ICRV system.

ICRV Proxy System serves as a connection between Blome, local systems and ICRV system. It enables local lab sites to perform testing and result validation much faster and more efficiently.