A new Lims system has helped one of the UK's biggest analytical laboratories to increase its annual sample throughput from 36,000 to 103,000 and to offer a standard five day turnaround
Coventry-based City Analytical Services, part of Severn Trent Services, uses state-of-the-art technologies to carry out a wide variety of organic and inorganic analyses into samples taken from potentially contaminated sites around the country.
As the company expanded, it became clear that the existing in-house job tracking system (JTS) would not meet the demands being placed on it. "The JTS required a tremendous amount of manual inputting and gave us no analytical quality control.
It was never going to take us from being a small/medium-sized enterprise to a much larger company," explained logistics manager Steve Hart.
As a result, City Analytical decided to investigate six Lims suppliers.
Each system was scored against a number of weighted variables, including cost, installation time, user friendliness and supplier support.
AIS Lims version 6 for Windows came out on top as the quality solution.
The new Lims operates as a standalone system, taking data directly from analytical instruments.
When the analysis is finished, these data are simply exported to Excel where a suite of in-house macros is used to generate reports in the required format.
"It's a very simple and effective system, especially if you want to interrogate Excel for management reports and statistics.
The data is very easy to manipulate", Hart added.
Mr Hart, who implemented the Lims system himself after a day's training by AIS, warned other logistics managers to think carefully about what they are looking for in such technology.
"Any Lims system needs to be easily configurable and easy to install in a laboratory.
There are bigger and more expensive systems than Lims version 6 out there, but they come with a lot more bells and whistles.
What you have got to ask yourself is whether or not you really need them all.
In that respect, and given its cost, this system is probably the best of its kind on the market today."
