Darren Handforth, laboratory manager at the Christchurch City Council, said: "Winlims not only exceeded our needs in terms of functionality, but was also easy to integrate with our IT infrastructure"
A major factor in the decision by Christchurch City Council (New Zealand) to purchase Winlims from QSI's Australian subsidiary was its outstanding ability to handle the complex task of sample scheduling in a multi-site environment, needed to manage the Council's waste water analysis laboratories.
The analyses to be carried out on each sample are determined by factors such as the sampling point, the nature of the enquiry and so on.
Samples and the associated data required to create the laboratory schedule need to be logged in either remotely by field operators or locally by laboratory personnel.
Authorised staff should be able to interrogate the system from any desired terminal location, either via the internet or the Council's intranet.
All this, plus the complete functionality to run a busy laboratory, was provided by the WinLIMS package.
The Winlims multi-site control module is designed to enable a single Winlims implementation to restrict access to information and functions to individual sites or staff.
This is especially useful when operating multiple sites within a single database over a wide area network (Wan).
Routine samples represent about 80% of the daily workload and these, with their associated task definitions, are logged in automatically using the Winlims auto-scheduling module.
