Industry Observation  

Talking about the development trend of software in the IVD industry

When it comes to "software" in the IVD industry, most people will define it as "an auxiliary tool for hardware equipment to improve efficiency". However, with the rapid development of digital technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing, the demand for digital and intelligent transformation of the IVD industry is increasing, and the role of software in the industrial production and manufacturing process is becoming increasingly prominent.

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industrial software plays a key role in promoting the digital transformation of the IVD industry and empowering the transformation of the real economy, which determines the level of high-quality development of the IVD industry to a certain extent. Today, I will select the IVD industry and talk about the development trend of software (the software in the following content refers to the upper-level computer software in the IVD industry).

01 Popularization

In the past decade, with the development of mobile Internet, software has changed people's clothing, food, housing and transportation, and derived large enterprises such as JD.com, Meituan, Ctrip, and Didi, driving economic consumption and development. The IVD industry has been relatively slow to develop software due to its high industry professionalism and different needs. The biggest feature of good software is that it can improve efficiency and easy operation. In recent years, policies have more encouraged software to empower the real industry. I believe that more and more IVD companies will pay attention to software, through software to improve production efficiency, product competitiveness, etc.

02 Simplification

Because of the particularity of knowledge areas and software operations, specific industries have built a certain moat, but they have become a stumbling block that hinders the further development of the industry. If the software is only used by professionals in this industry, then its audience will definitely be particularly small and its popularity will not be too high, and it will seriously affect the product's share and product strength in the market.

nucleic acid testing in the early days of manual input of messages is very inefficient, and it is also prone to errors, and later added the code scanning gun, OCR ID card recognition function, and opened up the nucleic acid results and health treasure and other information systems, which greatly improved the input efficiency and success rate, and was much easier and more convenient to use. If IVD instrument-related software requires doctors to use various complex settings for testing, and only researchers with professional backgrounds can operate it correctly, then such instruments and software are not competitive in the market. Simplify complex things, define complex processes with software into corresponding templates, abstract professional configuration operations and analysis logic, so that more non-professionals can also use software to do corresponding experiments, check the two options to run the experiment and output the results the user wants. Users are becoming more and more simple to operate and complex things to deal with software, which will be the future trend of IVD software.

03 Intelligent

Nowadays, speech recognition, human biometric recognition (face, iris, fingerprint, etc.), robotic process automation, machine learning, deep learning and other related intelligent technologies are very popular. All walks of life are adopting intelligent technology to improve their products, and technology and intelligence will be the mainstream. In the future, the combination of software and machines should achieve face recognition for security verification, speech recognition to generate text instead of input method input, machine learning and image recognition for device quality monitoring, and automated processes to achieve unmanned laboratories. How cool it would be to be able to operate various machines in the laboratory, monitor the operation status of various experiments, and extract the result data of various machines for analysis.

04 Scalable

Scalable means that the software can adapt well to the expansion of the business, and try to achieve reuse and small changes. However, the difficulty lies in the fact that we need to have certain standards and specifications when generating manufacturing instruments, and have certain planning and prediction for future research and development, and do a good job in advance. Timely reconstruction and optimization in the software development process. Restructuring and optimization does not mean that there is a problem with software quality, but an inevitable process with the development of the business and the improvement of business understanding. The high scalability of the software can improve the efficiency of software development and reduce maintenance costs.

05 Digitization

Digitalization can be broadly divided into generative manufacturing digitalization and market digitalization.

Generative manufacturing digitalization refers to the digitization of the entire product through the software system, such as the component distribution of each machine, the supplier of each component, the generation of batches, and the procurement; calibration information; biological experiment testing records; maintenance records, etc. The software system should be able to query all the information of a machine from scratch to the factory, and be traceable and traceable, forming the digitalization of production and manufacturing.

Market digitization refers to the digitization of all data after the machine leaves the factory, such as sales data, geographical distribution of instruments, shipping time, repair information, maintenance information.Try to imagine such a scenario: software digital management equipment, so that each device can find the corresponding information, pre-sales forecast data to update the procurement generation plan; After-sales technical support according to geographical allocation, big data statistical analysis of machine maintenance and calibration arrangements. Use data to generate build and post-sales plans and improve products.

06 Integration

Integration, including machine control integration and business integration. Usually one software should control a machine, which is not suitable.

Machine control integration refers to a software that can operate and control multiple business machines, run different experiments, and even cross-terminal control (such as PC software to control instruments and PAD software to work).

Business integration means that the instruments in the business system can form an integrated workstation, so the instrument control software should form an integrated scheduling and collaboration before to ensure the orderly operation of the business system. Business integration and control integration can form good business barriers and improve the company's competitiveness.

07 Platform-based

Usually if an enterprise has become an industry leader or benchmark enterprise, then the enterprise should formulate some industry standards and rules for data connection to lead the development of the industry. In other ecosystems, vertical fields are used to connect the company's business through the functions of platform-based software to achieve win-win and complementary results. For example, the analysis function can open up the machine data of various other manufacturers, formulate some industry data standards, specifications, and dock with other systems. The platformization of software can improve the comprehensive ability of enterprises, make up for their shortcomings through platformization, improve the market competitiveness of enterprises, and form a moat for enterprises.

All in all, to achieve the above points, you need to have a deep understanding of the business, understand the market, be familiar with manufacturing, and have excellent software architecture capabilities. Therefore, the development of software in the IVD industry is a competition of comprehensive capabilities.

Rocgene has been deeply involved in the IVD industry for many years, with instruments and reagents as the core, covering software, services, and consumables.

Rocgene Archimed Analyzer series software, full of functions, easy to operate, support customized development, and can realize a variety of LIS docking methods.