The 5th Annual SmartLabs Exchange meeting in Brussels (Mar 17th/18th) seemed to buck the recent trend of declining attendances and modest content with a good, total attendance of over 130 people, of whom 90 or more were end users. This meeting offers a different format to a conventional conference with an opening plenary paper per day, followed by two streams of interactive workshops and pre-arranged meetings between delegates and vendors. It’s a format that seems to be popular with users and vendors and nobody I spoke to was finding fault with the format or the content. Each delegate received a personalised programme, with a 2-day schedule for their selected workshops and vendor meetings. However, the level of interaction in the workshops did seem a bit limited i.e. not much discussion or opinion being shared, but on the other hand a number of the ‘workshops’ felt more like ‘presentations’ and didn’t offer so much opportunity for interaction
With regard to the technical content of the meeting, one of the underlying themes was the continuing debate about the overlap between LIMS and the growing number of ‘Q/A ELNs’. Presentations from LabWare, Velquest, LabVantage and Waters tackled this issue head-on. It is interesting to note that after staying away from the ELN market for some years, a number of LIMS vendors are now adding ELN functionality to their products to move into this market space. The underlying strategy seems to be one of offering existing (LIMS) customers the ability to extend their implementations by adding ELN functionality, rather than purchasing a separate ELN system and facing the subsequent interfacing issue. This approach has its strengths and weaknesses which I’ll look into in another post.
For the first time in one of these meetings I sat through a workshop on Software as a Service(SaaS). SaaS is currently in the hype cycle when it comes to laboratory systems. But with an increasing number of commercial offerings and some potentially significant benefits to customers, it is becoming increasingly important to get some clarity around the benefits and limitations.
Laboratory automation, as an ‘engineering’ function, got a good exposure, and I’ll put together a separate post or two on this topic. The concern is that there is very little formal education that specifically addresses this topic, despite the fact that it represents a significant challenge for most laboratories.
My participation included a workshop on the subject of ‘Managing User Resistance’; here’s my slides.
Overall this was a good and enjoyable meeting and a refreshing change from the more passive style of conference that serves the laboratory integration market.
