When Lafarge Aluminates selected SampleManager LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System) for worldwide implementation early in 1999, they addressed a host of strategic business issues, in addition to the technical issue of Y2K compliance that prompted the replacement project some 12 months earlier. Part of the Specialty Products Division of Lafarge, one of the world's leading producers of building materials, Lafarge Aluminates is the world leader for calcium aluminates. Its markets include the refractory industry, steel refining and building and civil engineering; each of which demand exacting quality standards from its suppliers. Lafarge Aluminates sees total customer orientation as the key driver of its current development and ambitions for the future.

So how does the introduction of a new corporate LIMS fit in as part of this philosophy?

Lafarge Aluminates considers improved data integrity in its manufacturing process a central issue in assuring standardization in the products that it delivers to customers. Comprehensive on-line instrument integration is key to this. Secondly, Lafarge believes that clearer, and more flexible, report formatting of validated laboratory data can play an important role in allowing better informed and timely decision making; management decisions that can impact greatly on its customers.

Lafarge Aluminates is headquartered in Paris and operates five clinker manufacturing plants; three in France and one each in USA and UK. The SampleManager project management team was based in Paris. Since the early nineties, the French sites had been operating a UNIX server based 16 bit in-house developed LIMS that was proving increasingly difficult to maintain, particularly the interfaces to lab instruments. In addition to the system requirements satisfied by SampleManager itself, a key reason for Thermo's selection as the supplier was its internationalism and ability to provide local support worldwide. Amongst other criteria was the Company's size and position as recognized market leaders in LIMS for the process industry. SampleManager was selected in March 1999, installed on local servers for the three French facilities in April. Training was conducted for members of the project management team in May and June 99. By November 99, core system setup was completed and users in France had begun populating manually their newly acquired LIMS with data. Connection to instruments for automatic data acquisition was operational in June 2000 on the first plant and is being currently rolled out for end of October 2000.
The US facility was equipped in October-November 99, and the UK in May 2000.

Lafarge Aluminates is also installing a 6th site in its central R&D location in Lyon, France.

All five installed databases undergo Oracle replication on a nightly basis in Paris. This replication provides a centralized view of laboratory data for the QA department. There were some technical challenges to overcome in achieving this; not least security and ensuring that data extraction did not affect the individual site servers.

Lafarge Aluminates chose to interface the data query and reporting tool BusinessObjects to SampleManager and this integration was completed in March. BusinessObjects is widely used in Lafarge Aluminates for the formatting of reports and the project team was keen to develop new skills in its use to apply to other systems. Univers Informatique, corporate partners of Lafarge Aluminates, assisted Lafarge in object and universe design.

From the outset, Lafarge Aluminate's aim was to adopt a shared system on all sites with a common language, common procedures and with local IT support. The aggressive schedule they set for rolling out SampleManager demonstrated confidence both in SampleManager and Thermo's ability to support them globally.

Finally, the importance of user acceptance is often overlooked in LIMS implementations. User reaction has been very positive. This is partly because of their involvement from the start of the project in helping to define requirements and in benchmarking exercises. There is nothing better for a user's morale, or indeed their productivity, than using a solution that is both easy to use and matches the way they operate!

Lafarge Aluminates is currently building a new plant in China and, being operated to the same high quality standards, will be integrated into the SampleManager network.

Thermo's flagship enterprise LIMS product, SampleManager, has an installed base of over 900 systems and around 15,000 concurrent users worldwide, and is one of the most established and industrially robust LIMS on the market. Industries served include manufacturing, chemicals and process, pharmaceutical, food and beverages, water, environmental and biotechnology.

SampleManager is designed to support laboratory operations and integrate those operations into the corporate enterprise. SampleManager has standard integration solutions to SAP R/3 and AspenTech's InfoPlus.21 process information management system and also integrates seamlessly with leading desktop applications.