LIMS, ELN & Lab Management Articles

An oil analysis report is judged on its last paragraph. The numbers above it are the same numbers any accredited lab would produce; the value the customer pays for is the sentence that says what is wrong and what to do. That sentence depends on three decisions that most software gets wrong: which limits a reading is judged against, which…

Ask a laboratory how it protects its electronic records and the answer is a backup schedule. It answers a question about losing files. It is no answer at all to the question an inspector actually asks: whether the file behind a signed result is the file that was there when it was signed. Most laboratory records are not self-contained. The…

Every accredited laboratory has a calibration schedule, and every schedule has a column that turns red when a date passes. Most labs believe that column is a control. It is a reminder. A red cell stops nobody from picking up the instrument on Monday morning, running twenty samples on it and signing the results, and by the time somebody reads…

A stability programme is not a series of tests. It is a calendar, and the whole calendar is known on the day the first study opens. A batch put on long-term storage this month commits the laboratory to pulling samples at fixed intervals for up to five years, for every batch, in every pack, at every storage condition. Knowing what…

The phrase “laboratory environmental monitoring” means two different things, and the people searching for it are usually looking for the one this site did not cover until now. One meaning is a laboratory that monitors the environment: rivers, soil, air, discharge. That is an environmental monitoring lab, and it has its own article. The other meaning is monitoring the environment…

A realistic sequence for leaving spreadsheets, Access and paper behind without pausing testing, including what happens to old data and who does the work.…

Breaks a quote into licensing, implementation, hosting and support, explains what drives the number up or down, and gives realistic ranges by lab size.…

Ask a lab manager which instrument integrations they run and most can list them. Ask which of those still works today and the answer gets slower. An integration is signed off on the day the first file lands where it should, and from that day it is nobody’s job. It keeps running until something it depends on moves, and then…

Every regulated lab has a shelf of signed SOPs and a drawer of completed worksheets, and every one of those worksheets carries the same claim: this procedure was followed. An auditor who wants to test that claim has one question, and it is not whether the signature is genuine. It is when the third step happened, and whether the fourth…

Search for the types of LIMS and you will find lists of four, five, six and seven, and no two agree. One divides by deployment: cloud, hosted, on-premises. Another by industry: pharmaceutical, environmental, clinical, food. A third by vendor packaging: enterprise, mid-market, starter. Every one of those lists is written by someone selling one of the entries. This article offers…