Lab managers and analysts love Bika and easily see web based LIMS automation improve productivity and customer satisfaction while reducing turnaround time, human error, admin tasks and the paper chase. It's more difficult reaching decision makers with the cost benefits. From own experience and on-line research, we set out to address them with a business case

The proprietary nature of LIMS texts made quantitive measurement impossible, but a thorough guide for lab use surfaced. Its a dynamic document and will be updated, we published it here

On the laboratory side, alarmingly, 3% is the smallest error predicted for manual data transcription, and bigger errors were measured

More information is available in the transparent Open Source movement and an indisputable case made. We discovered an excellent article on POS, the Professional Open Source business model, The Beekeeper by James Dixon of Pentaho. Paraphrased:

There is much media coverage and water-cooler talk about open source software and professional open source companies but these are so new that many people have misconceptions about how they work. In almost all cases I think people underestimate the potential of the POS business model but also how it differs from that for proprietary software.

POS combines traditional OSS projects run by a community of software enthusiasts and users with a professional company. The community adds strong support and world wide adoption of the software, while the company backs the project with full-time engineering staff and formal contracts sponsored by fee-paying customers

Customers benefit from the increased quality of the software and design, and increased traction enabled by the product's community. It is powerful because the customers, partners, engineers, and open source communities are all self-motivated in ways that are beneficial to themselves and, as a side effect, to all