Improving efficiency with LIMS

An Australian developer and distributor of laboratory informatics software solutions, LTech, was recently asked to design a laboratory information management software for emerging labs to help them improve operational and cost efficiencies. Emerging labs do what established labs do, but with fewer resources. As the business grows, they require better tools to manage operations.

Laboratory information management systems can transform emerging labs, offering benefits such as data automation, time saving, tracking and cost reduction amongst others. Emerging labs are run by dedicated and ambitious people preoccupied with day-to-day operation, leaving no time or budget for implementing software solutions. They have budgetary constraints and most LIMS solutions are expensive and implementation is time-consuming. The LTech team was challenged to design a system that is cost-effective, provides quick results and offers extensibility as the business grows.

LTech’s Research and Development Director Dr Pramod Pandey was instructed to “Design a LIMS software which must be affordable (meaning implementation cost below $10,000) taking the user from start to finish. That should include hosting infrastructure, software, and installation. The emergent lab must be able to use the software immediately and derive productivity gain from word go.”

Based on LTech’s experience in implementing large-scale and complex LIMS solutions, the company concluded that for emerging labs, the solution’s architecture must be compact and must deal with all essential components of LIMS but with a difference — it should be extensible. To achieve this goal, LTech decided to include an expansion bus around the core product so that when business grows, functionality can be improved with additional modules.

This led to the development of Lims1 Emergent, a solution designed to provide emerging labs access to a powerful information management system. As the operations grow, the labs can easily and instantaneously transition to a full Lims1 solution. The system, offered as SaaS, enables laboratories to track and manage their complete samples’ life cycle. Other features and benefits include: a modular solution — labs could add specific functions as required; scalable, easy transition to a full system as lab grows; traceability, various security and audit trail to maintain integrity; data mining and report — automatic COAs generation, since data is captured electronically, trend charting is possible; assist labs with regulatory and quality compliance (ISO 9001, ISO 17025).