Our customer offers ground breaking solutions in pre-analytical sample preparation molecular diagnostics, forensics, pharmaceutical process control and food testing markets in over 40 countries. The customer’s large sample (LS) automated nucleic acid purification instrument, a laboratory workstation, automates DNA/RNA purification from large samples for high throughput clinical and research applications.

Our customer needed to fulfill rising user aspirations, upstage competition and sustain growth – all this in increasingly limited timeframes. Against this backdrop, the customer turned to our team to maintain and enhance the software for its LS automated nucleic acid purification instrument; develop a protocol generator tool to facilitate the maintenance; and replicate the support environment offshore.

The Solution

Mindteck maintained the software based on a prioritized list of enhancements. An issue tracking tool was used to track bugs and enhancements. A stand-alone protocol generator tool was developed to support protocol programming and maintenance on the LS instrument, display protocols, create new protocols and modify existing ones. User-selectable modes were introduced to confirm every reagent-dispense by weighing. The system software was based on Microsoft Windows 2000 (SP3) using Open Database Connectivity-implemented Microsoft Access. Based on call level interface (CLI) specification, the widespread Open Database Connectivity application programming language used structured query language as its database access language. This allowed most external systems to communicate freely with the database within the instrument computer.