Today’s Best ELN May Not Be Another ELN

by Vasu Rangadass, Ph.D. | posted on September 25, 2025

Why swapping your ELN for another won’t deliver the ROI you think it will

Key Points:

• ELN swaps waste money: 600–1,000 RFPs a year prove the cycle is broken.
• Point solutions = silos. Science, IT, and ROI all suffer.
• Unified platforms deliver ROI.  L7|ESP contextualizes data and workflows.
• The question isn’t which ELN; it’s what architecture.

Across pharma and biotech, dissatisfaction with electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) is common. Scientists struggle with rigid interfaces, while IT leaders deal with high maintenance costs and endless validation exercises. The reflex response is familiar: issue an RFP (something that happens 600–1,000 times a year in a $480M market), evaluate vendors, and replace the old ELN with a new one.

The change feels decisive. Yet soon after implementation, the same frustrations resurface. The reason is simple: switching tools doesn’t fix the structural problem.

Why? Because ELN is just one cog in a much larger machine. Alongside LIMS, MES, and scheduling tools, it’s a patchwork of point solutions, each optimized for a narrow function but rarely designed to work in harmony.

When an organization replaces one ELN with another, the underlying architecture doesn’t change. Data still lives in silos. Scientists still resort to exports and spreadsheets to connect experiments. And context still gets lost between research, development, and manufacturing.

The pain isn’t the ELN itself. It’s the isolation, so typical of point solutions.

The ROI Myth

On paper, a new ELN promises a cleaner design and improved functionality. But those benefits come at a cost:

• Migration of historical data and records.
• Integration with instruments and enterprise systems.
• Retraining of users across teams.
• Revalidation to satisfy regulatory requirements.

These costs can far exceed the incremental gains. Industry analysts have repeatedly noted that swapping like-for-like systems rarely moves the ROI needle. The organization has invested heavily only to recreate the same limitations in a new wrapper.

A Digital Unified Platform Approach

The better question to this familiar cycle shouldn’t be which ELN should we buy now? But how should ELN function within a broader digital strategy?

A digital unified platform like L7|ESP  treats ELN as a capability, not a standalone system. Within this model:

• Experiment records are automatically contextualized with data from LIMS, MES, and inventory.
• Workflows span research, development, and manufacturing without manual reconciliation.
• Data is structured and standardized, making it immediately usable for analytics, AI, and regulatory review.

At L7 Informatics, we’ve seen this in practice. One leading cancer research center achieved a transformative shift in its QC and manufacturing operations by implementing L7|ESP. Digitalizing their workflows improved the accuracy and speed of QC assays, while operational insights could be generated at the click of a button. Reports on turnaround times, sterility rates, and pending assays gave lab managers full visibility and increased throughput. It also reduces the operational cost of buying and integrating point solutions.

Similarly, in manufacturing environments, organizations that once alternated between different LIMS or ELN vendors discovered that real efficiency came only from unifying those tools on a data platform. In one case, a biotech manufacturer realized a 50% increase in sample throughput after moving to L7|ESP. These outcomes weren’t the result of incremental tool swaps; they came from breaking silos and re-architecting around a digital unified platform.

Beyond ELN

Although this discussion primarily focuses on ELNs, the logic extends to the broader digital landscape. LIMS, MES, Scheduling, etc…, replacing one point solution with another is a short-term fix that leaves structural fragmentation untouched.

As I explained in Beyond Consolidation: Why Orchestration is the Real ROI Multiplier in Life Sciences, consolidation alone does not deliver lasting impact. The real value comes from integrated data management and workflow orchestration and automation: the ability to unify data and workflows across business functions so that every system contributes to a larger whole of the business.

McKinsey¹ has shown that biopharma companies that consolidate software and migrate to modern cloud-based architectures can free up as much as 30% of their R&D IT spend; resources that can then be redirected to fuel innovation, automation, and AI. That scale of ROI isn’t realized by swapping one tool for another. It requires a digital platform layer where scientific and operational data flow end-to-end.

Rethink the Question

Replacing your ELN may ease immediate frustrations and calm internal frictions, but it won’t solve the deeper issue. What drives real impact is not a better notebook, but a better foundation; one that unifies data, contextualizes it across functions, and positions your organization for AI and advanced analytics.

The choice is clear: repeat the cycle of point-solution swaps, or step back and build a digital architecture designed to endure. Only the latter delivers sustainable ROI.

For additional insights on ELN replacement decisions, including hidden costs and implementation considerations, see our complete FAQ for life sciences organizations.

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¹ Jeffrey Lewis, Joachim Bleys, and Ralf Raschke with Moritz Wolf, “Boosting biopharma R&D performance with a next-generation technology stack” (January 9, 2025)