Precise monitoring of expensive chemicals, reagents, and equipment is key to efficient lab workflows. LIMS software helps labs minimize waste by tracking inventory throughout the supply chain.
This often includes tracking a reagent hierarchy—including both the kit your lab ordered, and all its components, as well as the prepared reagents and all their ingredient reagents. This level of transparency enables precise forecasting to mitigate overstocking and understocking.
1. Automated Requisitions
In the high-stakes world of scientific research, delays in acquiring essential supplies can compromise experiments and lead to lost time. LIMS eliminates these problems by ensuring that researchers have immediate access to the reagents, chemicals, equipment, and supplies they need to complete their work. This level of organization helps scientists avoid unnecessary waste and improve productivity by allowing them to spend less time looking for materials and more time doing work.
Moreover, LIMS solutions can record a wide range of data about the condition of these materials, such as their shelf life and usage history. This data can be used for quality assurance and to monitor 3rd party vendor or equipment quality, thereby reducing the risk of subpar results and experiment failures due to expired materials.
Finally, a LIMS can help labs easily store quotes and invoices in one central location, enabling them to save time by avoiding unnecessary manual record-keeping. When evaluating potential LIMS solutions, be sure to consider the level of ongoing support they offer, including training resources for initial setup, software updates and maintenance, and regulatory compliance support.
2. Requirements Management
The ability to track and record supplies such as reagents is essential for any lab. A LIMS system can provide a digital, searchable record of inventory levels and usage that helps minimize waste.
This functionality can include the tracking of a reagent’s supplier, lot number, expiration date and reorder level. It can also flag a reagent for reorder when it is close to expiration, or alert you that a sample was tested with a reagent that has expired or may be contaminated.
Most importantly, your LIMS can record a sample’s chain of custody throughout its entire laboratory processing lifecycle. This includes scanning barcode labels or RFID tags to record the sample’s unique identifier, who scanned it and at what time, any clinical or phenotypic information recorded for it, the stage of analysis it is in, and its precise location within a freezer – down to the exact rack, bin, row, box and column. This helps reduce the likelihood of sample mix-ups, and can even help prevent theft. An advanced LIMS solution like Benchling also enables you to define your own inventory structures and reordering workflows through its easy point-and-click interface.
3. Purchasing
A LIMS with supply management capabilities can help to prevent costly reagents and supplies waste. The system can also optimize a lab’s inventory processes by preventing bottlenecks caused by slow data entry or out-of-stock items. Automated alerts and a supply chain management approach ensure that laboratories have the necessary inventory on hand to complete projects without delay.
For reagents that have multiple uses, LIMS can track the number of freeze-thaw cycles and other factors that affect a reagent’s usefulness. This can help scientists determine which reagents to use for future experiments and ensure that a reagent has been used in the right way for the correct result.
In addition to capturing this detailed information, LIMS can also allow for easy access by designated users. A powerful tool like Benchling’s unified interface lets users quickly reconfigure the inventory structure to meet the needs of their specific workflows. It also provides a clear view of sample/reagent locations throughout the laboratory environment to help identify and resolve issues as they arise. This is made possible with a fully connected ontology that connects samples/reagents to their respective experiment results, making it easy for scientists to understand the full chain of custody.
4. Inventory Management
A valuable LIMS solution will track and record a multitude of data specific to each laboratory sample. This includes information like storage location, who accessed the sample, and the number of freeze/thaw cycles completed. These details are invaluable as you try to maintain the quality of your reagents and minimize wasted materials.
Using this type of automated system allows lab staff to redirect their efforts from administrative chores to completing experiments, data analysis, and scientific inquiry. This increase in productivity will result in reduced attrition for your team and higher employee job satisfaction.
With the ability to automate and streamline processes, a laboratory information management system also helps laboratories meet regulatory requirements. This ensures that all processes are documented, traceable, and that records are available for review in case of an inspection.
Using an LIMS, laboratories can improve productivity and efficiency while reducing expenses. When integrated with an electronic lab notebook, a LIMS can provide a searchable digital representation of all data and supplies. This reduces the amount of time spent sorting through physical files and improves collaboration between team members.
5. Reporting
Any laboratory that ingests a lot of data needs a LIMS for efficient and reliable reporting. Instead of having different team members report on the results of their work in their own notebooks, a LIMS can streamline this entire process into a single, more intuitive and secure system that can be easily accessed by all lab staff.
When evaluating LIMS solutions, make sure to consider the vendor’s ongoing support offerings. This includes training resources, software upgrades and maintenance options, and regulatory compliance. It is also essential to evaluate the vendor’s scalability options for future expansion of sample volume management, additional analysis types or integration with new equipment.
Additionally, consider if the system is capable of tracking reagents that have a hierarchy. This means the system is able to record a parent-child relationship, where one record represents the higher-level reagent your lab ordered or prepared, and another records every component or ingredient that went into preparing this reagent. This is important for clinical laboratories to track as it ensures that no unused or expired reagents are used in a test or experiment.
