How to increase ROI on your global LIMS deployment

Successful food and beverage companies leverage their assets to achieve operational efficiencies. By streamlining work processes and reducing redundant systems, such companies ensure that their products are made and delivered to consistently high standards worldwide. However, food and beverage companies have faced significant challenges in addressing these goals with their laboratory information management systems (LIMS). This is because most LIMS available on the market today are thick-client or web-enabled solutions that require multiple servers or end-user thick-clients. Most of these systems have poor multinationalization capabilities for end-users, and IT departments have to deploy multiple systems to maintain enterprise-wide operations. Ultimately, they fall far short of thin-client solutions with multinationalization capabilities.

What is I18N/M18N?
I18N is short for Internationalization, with the number 18 signifying the 18 letters between the first I and the last N in the word. Internationalization allows a company to only deploy systems that support international time and date conventions within a single locale that shares those conventions. Thus, a single server could not support both US and European users, or even different locations within Europe.

M18N is short for Multinationalization, with the number 18 signifying the 18 letters between the first M and the last N in the word. M18N is a computer system standard for handling international and local time zone and language requirements, providing a consistent methodology worldwide from a single server. A thin-client solution with M18N capabilities allows a company to deploy one solution that supports international languages, time, number format, and date conventions across multiple locales, eliminating the need to provide multiple servers or thick-clients. Put simply, M18N enables a solution to be end-user specific, rather than server or client specific – a significant limitation of I18N systems.

A thin-client solution with M18N standards goes beyond I18N to offer multilocalization, multilingual support in a single solution that can be deployed worldwide. Multinationalization of LIMS is vital to global food and beverage companies because it can reduce user confusion, support audit requirements, and streamline IT system deployments around the world. Unlike with thick-client systems, thin-client solutions offer cost advantages in deployment and maintenance. M18N compliance also provides end-users with enhanced user satisfaction and increased productivity.

A fully thin-client M18N compliant solution offers several features that resolve many IT department dilemmas associated with multinationalization. These include:

* Time Zone Support
* Date Time & Numeric Formatting
* Enhanced Translation

Time Zone Support
With I18N systems, a time zone is established for the regional server or client, rather than for the end-user. If the user is in a different time zone compared to where the server resides, the user must mentally make the conversion and perhaps not calculate the correct time. With M18N, the time zone is established on the single server, but can be set for each user. This means that the database and application server can be maintained by the IT department in Shanghai, China, the main laboratory functions in Slough, England, and New Jersey, United States can perform sample receiving and testing, and headquarter operations in Paris, France can perform reporting and analysis functions, all at the same time, on the same server, and each reflecting their local time zone. Accordingly, a French user will see his own French time zone and does not need to convert the time from wherever the server resides.

Date Time & Numeric Formatting
Flexibility over date and numeric formats enables organizations to select between time and date and numeric designations on a per user basis on a single server, rather than on a regional basis per server or on each end-user’s thick-client. IT departments can select short, medium and long format conventions associated with the end-user’s norm. For example, the use of January 12, 2006, is the standard convention in the United States, but is written as 12 January 2006 in Sweden. This may not be confusing in long form, but can get very confusing if written in short form. In an I18N system, if one colleague in the United States enters the January 12th date as “1/12/06,” the colleague in Europe would read this: “December 1, 2006.” True multinationalization accommodates and resolves this conflict with no action required by the user. The solution automatically converts the date information into the selected format of the end-user. The adjustment takes place transparently at the server level and is correctly displayed on the end-user’s thin-client browser.

Enhanced Translation & Full Unicode Support
Pure multinational solutions utilize Unicode (see Unicode Sidebar) to support multiple languages. This means that various character sets for offices worldwide can be supported, and users can enter information into the LIMS using different languages. The screens and data are properly localized so that users can work in their native languages regardless of the server location.

Moreover, static text translation enables IT departments to eliminate redundant pages previously required for each local language. In I18N systems that do not utilize Unicode, in order to support different character sets, IT departments have had to mix codes and programs to handle characters from a wide variety of languages at the same time, which is not only time-consuming, but challenging as well. This is because all data have to be tagged, and mixing data from different sources is extremely difficult. Since Unicode has a single definition for each character, in a M18N solution with full support for Unicode, data corruption problems that plague mixed code set systems no longer exist.

Thin-Client LIMS with M18N Compliance
True multinationalization of global LIMS is now possible with LabVantage’s Sapphire LIMS (www.labvantage.com). As the first thin-client LIMS to offer the full scope of M18N functionality, Sapphire can help global organizations leverage their enterprise LIMS implementations to better support organizational objectives.

Sapphire is a true thin-client solution, not just a web-enabled one. All that the end-user requires is Internet Explorer 6.0+, nothing else (see Sapphire™ Architecture sidebar). Sapphire’s thin-client architecture, coupled with its multinationalization functionality, enables food and beverage organizations to support one application server for all international users. The IT department assigns a locale, time zone and language to each user by creating a profile for each user on the local application server. With full implementation of Unicode, Sapphire accommodates languages with any character set, including Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Swedish, German, Spanish and French. An organization would need to run multiple application servers or thick-clients around the world to achieve this same level of convenience. With Sapphire, the IT department would not have to be concerned with end-user thick-clients, or the deployment of multiple regional servers. Therefore, Sapphire greatly increases the speed and efficiency of a global LIMS deployment.

Sapphire also provides IT departments with additional flexibility and low total cost of ownership. With Sapphire, server support is greatly simplified. When time comes to upgrade Sapphire, organizations need only to apply the upgrade to the local application server, rather than each regional server or end-user thick-client. Therefore, IT investments are better leveraged and cost of ownership is reduced.

Summary
Thin-client and M18N have become mission-critical standards for global organizations as they seek to deploy more efficient and cost-effective solutions. LabVantage’s Sapphire is the only thin-client M18N-compliant LIMS on the market and offers significant advantages over thick-client and non-M18N enabled LIMS.

Why is Unicode Important?
A standard for language support, Unicode has existed since the beginning of the Internet. It is a character encoding system, like ASCII, designed to help developers create software applications that work in any language. It provides a unique number for every character – including letters, punctuation, and technical symbols – regardless of platform, program, or language.

Other encoding systems, often conflict with one another because they use the same number for two different characters, or use different numbers for the same character. As a result, computers (especially servers) need to support many different encodings, yet whenever data is passed between different encodings or platforms, that data always runs the risk of corruption. Not only does Unicode resolve these conflicts, it has been adopted by industry leaders such as Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, and Unisys.

In addition, Unicode is required by numerous modern standards, such as XML, Java, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, and WML, and is the official method to implement ISO/IEC 10646. It is also supported by many operating systems and all modern browsers. The emergence of the Unicode Standard – and the availability of tools supporting it – is among the most significant recent global software technology trends.

Source: http://www.Unicode.org

Sapphire™ Architecture
Sapphire™ has as its foundation a thin-client based architecture, developed to provide Sapphire™ R4 users, both internal and external to the laboratory, with the ability to access their Sapphire™ LIMS from any Internet or Intranet access device utilizing Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0+. This pure browser-based architecture (with no applets on the client) leverages an organization’s standard corporate infrastructures by enabling the open flow of information between internal and external systems, and by enabling the integration of 3rd-party applications.

The Sapphire J2EE application server provides the application interface between the server and the client machine via HTML and JavaScript. The web browser provides the application user interface. This browser/server approach results in a zero-installation, zero-footprint client architecture that greatly simplifies enterprise application deployment and administration. Thin clients communicate with the web server and Sapphire pages using request management servlets. Requests are verified and authenticated before being forwarded by the appropriate JSP page. JSP pages are text-based documents that contain standard HTML combined with a rich set of Sapphire™ configured tags, standard JSP tags and raw Java. Sapphire™ configured tags provide access to the standard Sapphire functionality by communicating through a set of Java classes that, in turn, interact with the components in the application server.

The Sapphire architecture provides a powerful, low-cost, low-maintenance framework for today’s competitive laboratory environment, particularly when compared to thick-client/server implementations, which typically carry a high cost of deploying applications to a large end-user base. By leveraging standard Internet technologies, Sapphire provides easy access to disparate data, both internal and external, using common web browser software. The architecture is scalable, highly reliable and secure.

For further details about R4 architecture and capabilities, please download the White Paper Sapphire from http://www.labvantage.com/products/index.html