The demands placed upon the analytical laboratory grow year by year, with increasing quantities of data to deal with, more stringent requirements for quality and traceability, pressure for work to be completed more quickly and to be undertaken in innovative ways. The Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) has become firmly established at the heart of the laboratory, however it provides only part of the functionality required. An integrated data pipeline joins the LIMS to other systems to enable the efficient flow of information around an organization, hence providing efficiency gains and underpinning advanced data mining and decision support systems.

A data pipeline should be much more than just a conduit - it should continuously add value to what flows through it. Raw data is analyzed to become information, which in turn gives rise to knowledge. The data pipeline should also have a memory so that everything that underpins the derived knowledge is safely stored.

Tessella has many years of experience in joining up disconnected systems and building integrated solutions in and around the laboratory. Projects include assisting a leading biotechnology company to prototype and implement a fully automated, high reliability, high availability production pipeline which will cope with the increasing volumes of mass spectrometry data produced as the company's business grows.

Integrated data pipelines don't just apply to laboratory data, they can provide similar benefits in other areas, such as processing field data. Tessella developed Flux-View for the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology as a streamlined system to download, process, visualize, quality control and archive the data from a new field instrument for measuring turbulent fluxes of heat, water vapour and CO2 from the land surface.