“Core facilities” have become an integral part of modern biomedical research infrastructures and today require integrated management tools to help ensure their optimization for research. Web-based software presents great opportunities, but requires innovation inasmuch as the current generation of laboratory information management systems (LIMS) is mostly comprised of automatons overseeing predictable laboratory equipment processes. By contrast, core facility processes involve not just equipment, and services, but also people: facility staff, users, administrators, PIs etc., each with their own exigencies and unpredictability. Here we present software developed during the last ten years in an academic-commercial partnership, which began as a community-driven effort. Conceived from the outset as a core facility management tool to answer the specific needs of multiple facility research infrastructures. We used an innovative ethnography approach whereby the software design extrapolates manifold use-cases using a framework of co-existing rules and policy matrices that can be constantly tuned by admin. The system can vary the outcome of multiple processes, integral to multiple users, and multiple facilities in parallel, based upon real-time context and diverse metadata that define, for example, a service, a piece of equipment, a preventative action, a training or even a metrology. Here we report on the performance and impact of the software in the singular case-history example of the Institut Pasteur Paris where the software was conceived. Our analyses of the facility evolution and the software's development during ten years reveals evangelization of the user community based on its improvements to better answer the needs of the scientific community. Our results demonstrate a key role for the software bolstering long-term downstream benefits including increased funding, higher scientific output, and quality assurances for services rendered.
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