Tracking column usage in Empower

cweech

<p>Does anyone have a good way of tracking column IDs in Empower?  Auditors are looking for this information, and we are trying to figure out how best to do this.  It can't quite be done in our LIMS because not every run is transferred into LIMS.  We added a custom field, Column_ID, to our sample sets that is a required field.  I know how to set the view filter to do a search of those Column_IDs (a Just-in-time search) and that covers our current projects.  However, we archive our projects on a monthly basis.  We keep them open for about three months, then they are backed up to our network.  Then you can no longer perform a Just-in-time search on those projects.  We have an Excel spreadsheet; that is searchable, but it seems like such a clunky out-dated solution.</p><p></p><p>Anyone have any suggestions?  We don't have Acquity systems yet so we are not able to use the eCord technology yet. </p><p></p><p>Thanks for your thoughts!</p><p></p><p>-Crystal</p>

HeatherLongden

I do know customers that are using NuGenesis SDMS to extract data from Empower periodically specifically to have such a column use record.

H

peteck2007

Hi!

Using Empower allone for this task seems not realy a good choice, especially if you have many, many projects. We tried to do this, but we still stick to paper based column logs.  We have also a custom field for the column ID, but it does not really help you to figure out the total column usage over all projects (and possibly many years) if you have some 350+ Projects per year - an global project takes an awfull lot time to build, and even then its not easy to see all injections, cause the number of displayable lines is not unlimited.

Maybe NuGenesis is more suitable for this task - we decided to keep paper records...

Alves76

I would agree with peteck2007 here.

I was thinking of doing the same but the show stopper for us was this - when you archive and remove old projects, the column information goes with it so you don't get a realistic column useage (unless I've missed something). So unless you will NEVER archive your data it won't work.

cweech

Peteck, would you mind sharing how you built your custom calc?  I am just curious.  We are still trying to make this work for us (even though it isn't perfect as you and other posters noted).  We have a sample set type field.  When projects get archived, a report is run on them before they are deleted.  Then the information from those reports is copied to Excel, so you can still search for column usage easily enough in the Excel spreadsheet, if the project(s) have already been archived.

It isn't a great system, but no one wants to do paper logbooks.

thanks!