Integrated Data Platform for an Analytical Instrument Company

Challenge

Petroleum provides not only fuel and energy for transportation but is also used in a variety of industries, including plastics, paint, fertilizer, insecticide and medicine. The exact composition of petroleum varies widely from source to source; hence, it becomes all the more important to precisely measure the physical and chemical characteristics of oil and lubes. A variety of analytical instruments and methods are available to precisely analyze these properties.

Mindteck engaged with a leading US-based analytical instrument company to integrate their product suite used for analyzing physical and chemical properties of petroleum products. The client was in the process of consolidating and enhancing their product portfolio based on organizational and market needs, and was also providing ongoing support to existing products in use. They required product reengineering, enhancement and continuous software development, as well as the implementation of new technologies and upgraded client server-based PC applications.

Scope

The project scope of the engagement included:

Integrating diverse instrument control software under one uniform product suite,

Development of multiple analytical instrument control software for a wide range of instruments,

Deploying reusable components for cost-reduction,

Reengineering and enhancing legacy instrument control software to counter obsolescence.

Solution

The project commenced with the active participation of Mindteck SMEs and technical team meeting with the client’s product owners and sales team to jointly design and plan the entire product suite.

Mindteck integrated and developed the control software platform for more than 15 analytical instruments. The platform configures, stores, and processes samples in sequence. Processed analytical results are stored via online monitoring in a database for a variety of needs such as post-processing and reporting, instrument and method calibrations, and instrument diagnostics. To incorporate reusability and scalability, Mindteck developed common components for instrument communication and customized the UI controls.

Software development was executed simultaneously with the client team’s hardware/firmware updates – requiring coordinated management of the respective project teams based at offshore and on-site client locations. The software was provided with 21CFR Part 11 compliance and a complete independent verification and validation of the software was handled by Mindteck.

Further onsite training and support for the Data System developed by Mindteck was provided for relevant users of the client team.

Software integration of the petroleum analysis, including RGA data with LIMS and Chromatography Data Systems, was developed by Mindteck.

Outcome

• Successful and timely rollout of new instruments to the market,

• Accelerated distributed development and testing by developing multiple instrument simulators; these could also be used by the client’s marketing team for training as well as to demo the software to end users in the field,

• New software supported faster processing speed, resulting in increased throughput and ultimately improved ROI for end users.