DuPont has increased productivity, collaboration, and data security and is continuing to expand with the Starlims Quality Manufacturing Informatics Platform across its R&D laboratory ecosystem.
With a legacy spanning over 200 years, DuPont has been at the forefront of delivering transformative chemical innovations, revolutionizing industries, and improving lives. With a growing portfolio and a large network of R&D labs worldwide, operational efficiency and collaboration are critical to the company’s success.
Partnering with STARLIMS and implementation partner CSols, DuPont embarked on a journey to consolidate its testing ecosystem, unlock productivity gains, and foster collaboration.
Business Challenges
In recent years, DuPont’s portfolio has undergone a significant evolution. While various mergers and business unit consolidations have created significant technological achievements and business growth for the company, getting its new and existing R&D laboratories to collaborate and use the same processes has been a challenge. Historically, individual R&D labs had selected their own Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS), resulting in a variety of disparate systems, legacy technologies, and manual processes.
The lack of cohesion was increasingly inefficient and resource intensive, requiring a high level of maintenance to support multiple technologies. To overcome these obstacles, DuPont set clear objectives:
- Reduce its number of legacy systems with modern platforms appropriate for the specific
business need - Create a centralized data management platform for transparency and control
- Simplify and streamline internal support
Why DuPont Chose STARLIMS
Collaborating with CSols, DuPont set out to find a LIMS that would consolidate, standardize, and modernize its testing ecosystem. To do so, the company needed a system that would help make workflows for sample management, resourcing, and testing easily configurable. It also was looking for mature formulation management and advanced data visualization capabilities. Finally, DuPont sought a solution that would help improve data security and global collaboration.
The project launched with a comprehensive assessment of its R&D researchers’ primary pain points, with the need for a centralized, accessible, and searchable data hub and better instrument connectivity emerging as critical themes.
Having STARLIMS as one of our LIMS offerings was really a nice fit. The STARLIMS system has a lot of capabilities that come with the system out of the box. However, the ability to customize those functionalities, that was one of the key pieces that attracted us to STARLIMS especially for more traditional analytical labs.
Christopher Dehen, PhD, Information & Data
Science Technical Manager, DuPont
From there, CSols and DuPont collected user requirements from its R&D analytical labs and started the search. After a vendor selection process, two solutions emerged as leaders meeting different business requirements critical to business success. As one of those two leading solutions of choice, STARLIMS offered not only the desired functionalities, but deep industry expertise and exceptional service.
DuPont R&D selected the STARLIMS Quality Manufacturing Informatics Platform, which included the LIMS, Scientific Data Management System (SDMS), and Advanced Analytics solutions to help them streamline operations and create business value.
Results
At first, DuPont started with STARLIMS implementations in two of its R&D analytical labs. After seeing significant success, the company has expanded its footprint with STARLIMS to six R&D labs, with plans to expand to more R&D labs throughout 2024.
One of the biggest success factors for DuPont was improving research productivity through streamlined and simplified workflows and processes. With STARLIMS, its researchers and scientists are now able to focus on important scientific experiments without losing momentum in mountains of documentation and complex workflows.
Another advantage that DuPont has realized since using STARLIMS is an improved collaborative environment. By providing its R&D teams with visibility into past research, the company has reduced redundant experiments and improved data management. Having a consolidated testing ecosystem has also allowed DuPont R&D groups to work across geographical barriers, communicate in real-time, and increase knowledge sharing throughout its R&D analytical lab community.
We want our researchers to not be doing a lot of manual data processing, but to be able to focus on analysis, decision making, and advancing projects, as well as have the most accurate and clean data to help make those decisions. STARLIMS helps fit a lot of those pieces together with our lab and R&D processes.
Christopher Dehen, PhD, Information & Data
Science Technical Manager, DuPont
Lastly, DuPont’s analytical R&D data is now centralized, easily managed, and automated within the STARLIMS Quality Manufacturing Platform. In turn, this has enhanced DuPont’s intellectual property protection by enabling secure experiment access and minimizing risk.
With STARLIMS, DuPont R&D is achieving a harmonized testing ecosystem, improved productivity, and global collaborative innovation. DuPont’s commitment to excellence and continuous improvement remains unwavering as they continue to optimize their laboratory operations and drive scientific advancements. By partnering with STARLIMS, DuPont is well-equipped to propel their scientific endeavors forward and remain at the forefront of innovation.
