Over the years, we’ve been involved in a number of LIMS/ELN selection projects. In this new series of blog posts, we’ll take a look at some of the lessons learned from those projects.
All of the solutions on the market today have a high degree of flexibility and configurability, which means that vendors often need to configure the solution in preparation for the demo. A demo of “out of the box” functionality can often be disappointing or may skew your evaluation towards the vendor with the prettiest interface.
Preparing your vendor, allows them to focus the demo to suit the needs of audience and the organization as a whole. This means that they don’t waste time demonstrating chemistry features to an audience of biologists or antibody tools to protein engineers.
Communicate your requirements to the vendor. You’ve gone through the process of gathering and prioritising requirements — communicate that information to your vendor. It will help them focus their demos and presentations on the high priority requirements you have.
Make sure they understand the audience and their interests. If you have a fairly diverse audience, then you may get better feedback from your staff by breaking the demos into smaller more focused sessions. This may make better use of your staff’s time, and will allow each team to ask more in-depth questions.
Know Your Vendors
Knowing your vendors technical capabilities is one thing, knowing their size, experience, investors and finances are another.
- How stable is the vendor?
- How many employees do they have?
- Are they a growing concern?
- Are they publicly held, or bootstrapped by their own sales?
- Have they had VC investment? If so, when is an exit anticipated. An exit such as a buyout can result in changes to the company organisation and stability and affect the pace of releases. If it’s a merger with another company, it can mean changes in pricing, or additional products added to your system with differing user interfaces?
- Who are their customers? How many of your competitors use them?
- Do you have people in your network with personal experience using their software?
- How responsive are they when setting up demos or answering service calls?
Read more of the ELN/LIMS Blog Post Series
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