How Laboratory Information Management System improves Lab Functioning

[Deepak Bohra]

A laboratory information management system (LIMS) is basically a software-based solution, which helps modern labs to improve their workflow and operations. This system offers a wide range of features to the modern labs for better management.

There are many sectors like the food & beverage industry, which utilize LIMS in their operations. In addition, LIMS is available through on-premise, web-hosted, and cloud solutions as well as software. So, this article will talk about how important and helpful LIMS is, various types of sectors utilizing LIMS, and functions of LIMS.

How LIMS is helpful?

LIMS offers a broad range of features, which attracts various enterprises and laboratories to adopt this solution. There are many companies that provide on-premise LIMS, cloud-based LIMS, and web-hosted LIMS as per the need of the users. These features include:

• It provides improved sample management.
• This system provides better workflow management.
• It helps in quality assurance.
• It improves the efficiency of the labs.
• Promotes standardization of the tests and procedures.
• It automates the collection of samples.
• This system increases the accuracy of the results.
• Enhance the inventory management of the labs.
• Keep a record of everything.

Where LIMS is being used

There are many sectors utilizing laboratory information management systems for improving their workflow management and availing various benefits of the LIMS. We are writing down some of the fields that use LIMS:

Food & Beverage Labs

Various food and beverages products require quality checks before beginning with the production of the packaged food & beverage products. Due to this, companies establish labs to test the purity and quality for certification. These labs further implement LIMS solutions to improve the workflow and accuracy of their results.

Oil and Gas industry

LIMS helps the oil and gas industries to make better and timely decisions through the accumulation of the data across their premises and also complying with regulatory requirements. It helps organizations to better manage their inventory level and workflow across their premises.

Hospital labs

Hospitals have a huge amount of data and samples, which can cause a delay in the results of the tests. So, LIMS plays an important role in hospital labs by reducing the obstacles in the whole process, which boosts the speed of results. These solutions help hospitals to increase their result efficiency and speed.

Pharmaceutical industry

LIMS for pharma helps the pharmaceutical companies to improve their batch management, encourage stability in testing, barcode label printing, enhance consumables management, better environmental monitoring, and many more. In addition, such benefits encourage various pharmaceutical companies to implement LIMS across their enterprise.

Environmental Testing Laboratories

These kinds of labs test a broad range of samples including water samples, air & soil samples, and many more. So, LIMS helps such labs to derive reliable results with precision and minimum errors. It also enables the organizations to streamline all their samples with a better workflow.

Through LIMS, they can effectively and efficiently manage sample registration, test results, testing, and make professional & customized test reports.

Functions of LIMS

A laboratory information management system is a crucial tool, which is majorly used for sample management. However, there are many reasons behind the high adoption of this system across several organizations but we are mentioning a few of them.

• LIMS automates various daily, weekly, and monthly reporting tasks.
• It assigns tasks to researchers.
• It outlines the place where the sample requires to be passed in the whole process.
• It makes sure the faster movement of the sample across the procedure.
• This system also enables flexible interfaces to instruments and other 3rd party systems.

Conclusion

A laboratory information management system refers to a software or solution, which enables numerous labs operating in various industries to better manage their samples, improve their workflow, efficiently generate results, and many more. Additionally, LIMS also helps organizations to manage their inventories standardize their various procedures.

The demand for such systems is increasing due to various factors like growing demand for lab automation, low implementation cost, and increasing technological advancements by the LIMS providers. Moreover, a variety of benefits offered by LIMS to the labs like better workflow, minimized human efforts, etc. would boost the demand for LIMS in the market.