ASI Standards

Snapshot

What they do

ASI Standards manufactures certified reference materials — the calibration standards a laboratory uses to prove its instruments are reading true. Petroleum, lube oil, crude oil and polymers. Oak Ridge North, Texas.

The standard they work to

ISO 17034, the international standard for reference material producers, which requires every certificate to be traceable from raw material through production and testing to the number printed on the label.

Delivery

Delivered by Value-First Team.

The relationship

Nov 2024

The full architecture specified: a laboratory information management system built inside the platform ASI already ran its commercial side on, using native objects rather than custom ones.

Early 2025

Phase one built — the product catalog and the pricing engine behind it.

2024 – 2025

Elements of Interest, a show co-produced with ASI.

Mid 2025

Work order management, order-to-work-order automation, and training for the production team.

Dec 2025

A seven-page documentation hub handed over, so the team could operate and extend the system without us.

Where they started

A purpose-built laboratory system had been implemented and had not taken hold. ASI was running a laboratory manufacturing operation without the system it had bought to run it on.

Underneath that sat a harder problem. The commercial side of the business already ran on one platform; the laboratory side ran somewhere else. So the catalog, the order, and the laboratory work that fulfils the order lived as separate records in separate places, with people carrying the joins in their heads.

The scale made that expensive. Roughly 1,800 products, each priced off a formula rather than a fixed number — matrix type, set size, concentration, dangerous-goods handling and accreditation premium all move the price. Every certified reference material also carries a concentration, a measurement uncertainty and a unit for each of more than twenty elements. That is a lot of exact numbers to keep true by hand, in a business whose entire product is being exactly right.

What we delivered

A complete LIMS architecture on native platform objects, no custom objects required for core functionality — a clean separation between what can be made or sold, what has been promised commercially and operationally, what is being delivered, and the QC work being performed on it. Association patterns, pipeline design and property naming conventions specified end to end.
Phase one, shipped: the product catalog pipeline, the core product and per-element properties, the pricing calculation logic that turns matrix, set size, concentration and handling into a price, and the basic customer order workflow.
Work order management, including order-to-work-order automation, a fourteen-stage accountability checklist for the order flow, and training for the production team.
An ISO 17034 map — how the model carries traceability, uncertainty reporting, QC batch management, certificate-of-analysis workflow, and instrument calibration tracking.
A documentation hub, seven pages covering the architecture, the process documentation, the catalog, training resources and the project timeline — written so ASI's own team could run and extend the system independently.
Elements of Interest, a show co-produced with ASI.
Phases three through six specified but not yet built: QC and testing integration, certificate automation, full element coverage and inventory, and a customer self-service portal. Each documented to the level of detail you can build against.

What changed

Pricing that lived in a spreadsheet and in individual people's heads became logic the system executes. The catalog, the orders, and the laboratory work that fulfils them stopped being three separate places and became one connected chain — on the platform ASI already used for everything commercial, rather than a second system to buy, integrate and maintain.

The part not yet built stopped being guesswork. Certificate automation and full ISO 17034 traceability are specified in enough detail to build against whenever ASI chooses to, which means the remaining work is construction rather than discovery.

And the team was handed the documentation to operate it themselves — the outcome being independence, not a standing dependency on us.