Today, pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods companies waste up to 15 percent of their research staff and investment on duplicated experiments. Traditional niche technologies are powerless to resolve this situation and, in fact, their inherent lack of integration tends to reinforce the problem. Yet these niche solutions are common in the research domain and often fall into a classification known as Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELN's). ELN data from niche solutions is underutilized due to poor application scalability and the high cost of point-to-point integration. Moreover, companies tend to use diverse silos to capture and manage data from experiments, procedures and instruments. At best, these approaches usually result in isolated data records that easily lose their sense of relationship and context. At worst, a company resolves itself to continue onward with a painfully manual research knowledge management process while their product pipelines dry up and the world around them continues to insist on more innovation. Add to this the fact that the company's intellectual property is left in a highly venerable state, which severely inhibits patent prosecution and litigation efforts.

Teamcenter's new solution for Research Knowledge Management changes the way customers will manage lab notebook and related data by enabling them to capture and organize multiple types of records in a single, web-based environment. Subsequently, entitled users access it using tools they already understand in an environment that automates best practices.

"The Teamcenter RKM solution represents an important technological advancement that should help research-intensive companies overcome many of the cultural barriers that have inhibited large-scale adoption of automation and integration technology in the research environment. The PLM-based approach from Siemens PLM Software differs from traditional electronic notebook (ELN) solutions in that it emphasizes reduced experimental redundancy for increased productivity and facilitates attainment of higher-order business objectives such as support for the patent process and improved intellectual property (IP) management. The entry of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions into the process R&D domain is a departure from informatics solutions developed by analytical laboratory specialists as has historically been the case. ARC believes that PLM will be a major IT investment in the R&D domain over the next five years."

Paula Hollywood
Senior Analyst Process Automation, ARC Advisory Group