MicroCheck Technical Services has laboratories in Trowbridge and Coventry, UK, and offers testing and consultancy services to the food and beverage, pharmaceutical and allied industries
Installation of QSI's Winlims has brought major efficiency improvements to a contract laboratory.
MicroCheck Technical Services holds Ukas accreditation and is also approved by Defra, MHRA, and leading retailers such as Marks and Spencer.
Before Winlims, a largely paper-based system was used to record samples and results.
There was a bottleneck at the reporting stage, with significant implications for clients holding stocks of foodstuffs pending a microbiology report.
MicroCheck's invoicing was also affected, with an obvious impact on cash flow.
Two years on, with the same staffing levels, sample throughput has increased by 50% and many of the formerly manual processes have been automated, as described by Erik Thompson, site leader at the Coventry laboratory: "Samples are booked into Winlims via an electronic spreadsheet.
"Labels are generated automatically, and laboratory worksheets printed off in minutes.
"Results are automatically checked against customer specification limits held in the system.
"Because Winlims holds information in intuitively linked tables, it's easy to extract data and present it in the client's chosen format.
"One customer has said that because of this, his internal reporting has speeded up by 2-3 days.
"Invoicing is also done direct from the Lims data, which has improved our cash flow.
"We've also been able to seamlessly integrate data from our new laboratory in Coventry into the 'parent' Winlims system in Trowbridge.
"We couldn't have grown as we have without Winlims, and it's now hard to imagine life without it" said general manager Bill Thompson.
Referring to QSI's new software rental scheme, he added "Winlims Rental wasn't available when we started, but we think it's the ideal solution for companies like ours - our support contract with QSI is now on a rental basis."
