Situation

A top food and agriculture company wanted to sustain its growth without additional expenditures. Management elected to find efficiencies in quality control laboratory operations to support the increased workload without adding equipment or headcount. To realize these efficiencies, the client upgraded their end-of-life Sapphire LIMS to LabVantage 7. Multiple gaps and inconsistencies in the legacy system prevented a clean migration to the new LIMS. The client selected CSols Inc., a LabVantage Solutions Inc. partner with critical data structured knowledge, to support the data cleanup, data migration, and LIMS upgrade.

Objectives

The goal of the upgrade was to realize efficiencies via LabVantage LIMS automation and eliminate the risk of Sapphire LIMS going off support. The client also aimed to maintain data continuity during the upgrade process and therefore needed to complete a static data cleanup and data migration before beginning the upgrade.

Challenges

  1. Lack of data standardization: the original data entities were not standardized, and there were many duplicate entries or similarly worded data elements in the legacy system.
  2. Data inconsistencies, gaps, and errors: dirty data was widespread in the legacy system, with many missing or incorrect entries; each of which required assessment and documentation

CSols’s Role in the Solution

  • Data management and transformation support:
    • Organized data into manageable blocks for facile assessment
    • Scrubbed data blocks and removed duplicates and draft records
    • Assisted with new naming convention development and modified analysis names, reference method sources, reference numbers, and test methods
    • Updated data points to follow new naming rules and configured related data points to link to the updated key identifiers
    • Transformed relational tables and data points
    • Executed scrubbing tasks for data export files
    • Documented modifications to each key identifier and parameter
  • Team lead resource:
    • Developed a project plan and managed the transformation team
    • Provided ad hoc support to CSols data experts and client resources

Benefits

  • Accelerated project timeline for data transformation and migration
  • Increased efficiency of client resources working on the upgrade by handling data migration and clean-up tasks
  • Accelerated validation timeline by providing a Summary of Changes document
  • Improved efficiency and user experience with standardized fields and naming conventions

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