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| When Not To Replace Your Paper System | ||
| Occasionally,
I meet customers who love their paper systems
so much that they want to replace it with a
software system that entirely mimics the paper
system. Here’s my question to them, “If
it’s perfect, and you don’t want
to change it, then what’s the point in
spending a lot of money to recreate it?” Changes and Improvements Installing a piece of software will change the way you work. It has advantages and disadvantages, but ultimately, it is just different from a paper system. Over time, your work process changes, sometimes for the better, other times for the worse. When you put in any new system, paper or automated, it’s the perfect time to reevaluate and rethink your work process. Whether people intend to or not, they often end up spending time coordinating work-flow with the new system. Often, some processes will be changed, and the system will be modified to accommodate other processes. To some extent, therefore, you will be spending time and money on figuring out and mapping processes, even if you don’t do it in a formal manner. While you’re at it, consider spending a bit more time to take an in-depth look at your processes with an eye on process improvement. After all, many of us proudly say that our companies are interested in “continuous process improvement,” so this shouldn’t be a startling idea to anyone. Paper <> Automated* A paper system has different event points than an automated system. They do not map in an identical manner. Let me illustrate this based on “real life” examples. Paper System Example of Moving a Sample From Lab A to Lab B:
LIMS Example of Moving a Sample From Lab A to Lab B:
Initial Stumbling Blocks (i.e., questions that the team answered within implementation): Question: How does the sample get “signed-off” so we “know” that Lab B actually received the sample, since there will no longer be a piece of paper? Answer: As it turns out, the team realizes that they never lose samples. They realize that the samples are either in Lab A or Lab B. So, if the samples show up in Lab B’s list of work and aren’t on the Lab B shelves, the Lab B team knows the samples were never walked over from Lab A. Question: In the past, someone in Lab B would get the sample from the shelf on which it was left and start working on it. Now, they have the sample showing up in the LIMS. How do they match up the LIMS notification with the samples on the shelf? How does this affect the flow of work? Answer: It turns out that, for some samples, the lab preferred that the sample show up this way, and the team would then go to the shelf to find the sample that matched with their list of work. For other samples, the team created a different type of work list, in which they would grab a sample and scan it in using its barcode. In effect, as the team grabbed a number of samples, they created the list within the system, rather than the system creating it for them. Because of the different types of storage and the different types of samples the Lab B team handled, the Lab B team found it most efficient to work in two different ways, depending on the work they were doing, and built those two ways into the system. Automated <> Automated* Let’s add one more twist to this example, even though it’s slightly off the topic. Let’s suppose that, instead of going from a paper system to an automated system, this was a project to convert from one LIMS brand to another. Suppose that one LIMS brand requires that someone build the list of work before another person can use it, while the other LIMS automatically created the list. In this case, you can see that there could be another modification to the flow of work as it is mapped for one system from the other. So, even two automated systems won’t necessarily map identically, which is something to keep in mind when trying to map a paper system to an automated one, where the differences are even more profound. * “<>” is the “not equals” sign. |
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