Preventing Vendor Lock-In – Better Safe than Sorry

Imagine you have spent a lot of money and time implementing an eQMS. You eventually find that your processes aren’t the most efficient and need an update, but the system that you have implemented cannot support you in executing the new and improved processes.

You contact your eQMS vendor, because you would like their help in the system retirement, without data loss. Unfortunately, the vendor tells you that this is not included in the support. They will be able to retrieve your data for a large sum of money and start a project that will be on the vendors terms. This may lead to loss of data, unreadable data and/or data that is not ready to use for migration. You have become a victim of vendor lock-in.

Table of Contents

1. What is Vendor Lock-In?
2. Negative Effects of Vendor Lock-In
3. Preventing Vendor Lock-In
   • Vendor Selection
   • Contract
   • Back-up, Back-up, Back-up
4. The Cure to Vendor Lock-In

1. What is Vendor Lock-In?

Vendor lock-in is a concept in which a vendor makes a customer dependent on the vendor’s product. The customer will be unable to choose another vendor without significant costs or data loss.

There are a lot of examples of vendor lock-in within all aspects of our lives. One of the most used examples is the coffee example: You have a coffee vendor whose coffee you really love, however, to drink this coffee you need a special coffee machine. This machine can only make coffee from the coffee beans of this particular vendor. When the quality of the coffee lowers, or your taste changes and you want a different coffee vendor, you will also have to buy a whole new coffee machine.

Other words that might have the same definition as vendor lock-in are:

• proprietary lock-in
• customer lock-in

2. Negative Effects of Vendor Lock-In

When you become “victim” of vendor lock-in, there will be a few consequences to keep in mind.

Costs
When a vendor has made you dependent on their system, they might be able to increase the costs of the use of their product significantly. They are also able to ask for a substantial amount of money to retrieve your data from the system if you want to retire.

System Quality
When a vendor has made you dependent on their system, they are able to gradually lower the quality of the system or the support without serious consequences.

Compliancy
A vendor can perform updates that make the system less or not compliant with your processes.

Data Loss
Not every vendor has the capability to help you with the system retirement, this could cause you to lose your data. Even when they are able to retrieve data from the system, it could be in an unreadable format or in a format that is not usable. They could also fail to do a proper verification after the extraction, which could lead to corrupted and/or lost data and/or other unforeseen consequences.

Vendor Switching
When you would like to retire your current system and you need to contact your vendor about this, the vendor could try to sell more of their product(s) instead of helping you. The before mentioned consequences could prevent you from choosing another system. Even when you get through all these steps and you retrieve your data, the data might not be set up to be implemented into a new system. The vendor makes it (almost) impossible to switch.

3. Preventing Vendor Lock-In

Everyone can become a victim of vendor lock-in, sometimes without even knowing. We have, however, found a few ways that can help lower the risk of being locked in. For example extra topics to consider during vendor selection, what to specifically look for or include in the contract, or in case you are already using the vendors application how to leverage a solid back-up strategy.

3.1 Vendor Selection

System Retirement
Ask a potential vendor if and what processes they have for retrieving your data from the system. Also ask if this is included in the standard service or if you have to pay for it (and ask about the costs).
If they have a process for this, ask if they can extract the data in the structure that is workable for you. Sometimes vendors do have a process to extract data, but the data will be extracted in a specific structure. If that structure does not work for you or your new system and they cannot change the structure, then you are left with unreadable and unusable data.

Auditability
Where is the office and can you visit? Are they open to being audited by you?

Reliability
Make sure that the vendor is a trusted vendor. Ask them about their development processes. Ask other customers of this vendor what their experience is with this vendor. How are support issues handled?

Make sure that you have a sandbox environment of the vendors system. This way you can make sure that the feature(s) you find important to have, of which the vendor says is there, is actually there.

Change Communication
Check what their change process is. How long before a change do they communicate to their customers, and how do they communicate a change. Are they open about details of the change?

3.2 Contract

Support Reaction Time
Make sure that the reaction time is not too long, and that there is always support available outside of office hours for critical issues. When your system is down on Friday at 17:00, you do not want to have to wait for the support team to be back in the office on Monday for the issue to be fixed.

Change Communication
Make sure that the communication for important changes is done before the term notice. This way you have enough time to assess the changes and possibly change your process so that the system will stay compatible, and you will have enough time to prepare for validation.

Regular Audits
Make sure the contract contains the ability to regularly audit the vendor, with their (full) cooperation. This way you can monitor if they have proper development and support processes and follow these processes, which keeps the quality of your product high.

Data Extraction Support
If they have data extraction included in their regular support, make sure that this is stated in the contract. If this is an additional service they provide, you could have the costs of this service included in the contract, to make sure they do not exponentially increase the cost when you need it.

Term Notice
The termination notice is usually stated in a contract. Make sure it is not too long. If you are implementing a new system, there is usually a transition period, but you do not want to keep paying for a product you are not using after this transition period.

Price Increase
It is normal for a vendor to increase the price of the usage of their product and/or their support. Keep in mind that this increase should be limited. Make sure that the frequency of price increase as well as the percentage of the increase is stated in the contract.

3.3 Back-up, Back-up, Back-up

If you have already implemented the vendors product, make sure that you always have a back-up of your data in an internal location. This way you will limit the risk of losing your data. If you are not able to create the back-up yourself, ensure the contract contains an agreement about receiving a database copy of your data from the vendor.

If the vendor is not able to help with the data extraction, you can find a third party that is able to help you with the extraction.

4. The Cure to Vendor Lock-In

As long as your system is still helping you with your process automation, you will find no difficulties with the system you are locked in to.

However, when you would like to switch to another system, or stop using a system altogether and your vendor cannot help you with retrieving your data or with the data migration, then you could have big issue. You can either accept the data loss, or manually migrate or extract the data, or you can find a third party that can help you with data extraction or data migration.

ION Pharma has a specialized data extraction team that is devoted to retrieving your data in a manner that is readable/useable for either you or your new system. If you are interested in knowing more about our data extraction or data migration services, you can contact us without obligation.