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Out on a LIMSThe Blog for People Who Risk Life and LIMS on a Daily Basis

"Safety" is the 2017 Word of the Year

Volume IIIEntry 1 of 55 in 20171 min read3 comments ↓

Written by Gloria Metrick on . Published as written. It may not reflect how these systems work today.

I keep hearing customers talking about wanting "safety." Past years are gone when "quality" or "best practices" were the buzzwords. This year, the buzzword is "safety."

In the QC Pharma/Biotech area, they talk about how they're not picking products necessarily best for their situation but those that have been selected and audited many times, previously. In these days when so many products have similar features, they seem to believe that it the product doesn't matter as much as the reduced risk. I can't argue with that.

Even where customers don't like the product they're selecting for one reason or another the safety factor is still important-enough that they feel they can put aside their misgivings about concerns such as technical issues.

In addition, in all areas, customers are looking to make purchases that make them feel more secure. In the services area, that would be to select the largest companies offering whatever services they need to purchase and waiting until enough resources are available and hopefully in the budget year when they need them.

With all the terrible projects that go on, it's no wonder that customers are now looking for "safety" over all other factors. As usual, I should add that this is not true of every single customer but is my generalization of what is going on in our industry.

Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com/

The conversation

3 comments from 2 people, January 3 to January 5, 2017. Gloria replied once.

  1. Sam Klaidman (@SKlaidman)

    Gloria, this is not true only in the LIMS world. Last week I was talking with the COO of a SaaS company and he said: "Companies are only interested in three things; increasing revenue, decreasing costs, and mitigating risks." Seems short sighted to me but that is why they make the big bucks.

  2. John H. Jones

    A less high brow way of saying what Sam said is: "We want to make more money without the risk". It kinda goes with... "We want something for nothing".

    Anyway, all I can say to those folks is... more power to ya.

    The rest have had to do their homework and pick the system that simply will work best for them given the constraints of the Value Formula.

    You have to get out and meet with literally hundreds and hundreds of clients and potential clients to come to any conclusions or to see any real trends. We have done that and do that every year and I can say that I have heard very, very few say they are buying or choosing a product based on it being the "Safe Choice". I am sure there are some people driven by that but I am just not seeing that as a trend. The old fashioned "Value" is what I see drives decisions.

  3. Gloria MetrickAuthor

    I haven't run into customers that don't "do their homework." To get to a point where they can make a decision, most people want to to understand the decision they're making and I'm not in any way saying that they haven't done that nor that they don't understand the choices they're making.

    In fact, the people I speak with tend to be extremely experienced with the industry products and the issues behind them.

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