Ten Top Tips for Replacing Your Existing ELN

Is your legacy ELN holding you back?

And are you ready to take your lab to the next level? In this tipsheet, we outline ten things you need to consider when making the decision to replace your old lab technology.

GO WEB
Your incumbent desktop ELN is a bulky application, requiring overhead to maintain. Switching to a feature-rich web client provides performance improvements, with a zero-footprint installation.

CONSOLIDATE SYSTEMS TO SAVE ON COSTS
IT budgets are commonly more restricted, making it challenging to manage multiple systems. Consolidating systems provides an immediate cost saving benefit, and standardizing on an enterprise platform for both chemistry and biology makes sense.

SIMPLE INTERFACES ENCOURAGE USER ADOPTION
Desktop ELNs often have many complex interfaces which are an overhead for usability and training. An intuitive web application helps users get up and running quickly.

DON’T HOST OR MAINTAIN THE SYSTEM YOURSELF
Secure ISO27001 cloud solutions are industry standard nowadays, simplifying your IT infrastructure and overhead significantly.

REDUCE TYPING IN PASSWORDS
Leverage advances in single sign-on (SSO) using modern tools like Auth0, to provide a seamless end-to-end experience across multiple tools.

INTEGRATIONS ARE KEY Informatics deployments may be highly configured, with integrations to LIMS, corporate registration, inventory and publishing systems. Select a vendor that has feature-rich and robust public APIs, to facilitate communication.

OUTSOURCING IS COMMONPLACE IN THE MODERN RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT
The system you select needs to facilitate direct communication with CRO partners, in a transparent yet secure manner, allowing for the full roundtrip of all information so that your internal knowledge base becomes enriched.

THINK ABOUT SAMPLE MANAGEMENT
Researchers need to be able to generate samples for analytical testing and biological assays for internal requesters but also externalized providers. Look for a tool that provides the capability to create samples directly in the experiment, with referenceable barcodes and hyperlinks.

USE INDUSTRY-STANDARD FORMATS FOR DATA
Choose a vendor that leverages modern formats for storage of chemical and biological structures, giving you assurance that your data is secure and future proofed.

THINK ABOUT YOUR LEGACY DATA
As you move to a new vendor, will you keep a few copies of the old system alive, move the information to a data lake or migrate it to a new system?

If you would like to find out more about ELNs, get in touch.