Information revolution
15 Jan 2000
Laboratory information management systems (LIMS) are information engines. With a database at their core, they collate, sort, store and manipulate the information generated in laboratories. As everything that happens in today's laboratories has to be documented, from staff movements to sample analyses, the amount of data generated is too large to be handled effectively any other way.
Their use within the mainstream process industries has, historically, been somewhat limited. LIMS are generally associated with the more rarefied areas, such as pharmaceutical laboratories which use them to track the progress of drug candidates through the tests required to demonstrate their safety, efficacy, toxicity and pharmacokinetics. Every scrap of information is needed if a successful drug is to be approved.
However, they also find many applications at the heavier end. Petrochemical plants' control systems take regular samples of products for analysis, to check that the process is working properly and the product quality is acceptable. The process variables at the time the sample was taken have to be recorded, as do all the results of the tests on the sample, which are compared against a standard. If there is any discrepancy, the process variables have to be altered to bring product quality back into line.
A similar task is performed by the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software increasingly used to oversee the operation of chemical plants a 'quality module' within the software will order that a sample be taken from a process for analysis to confirm product quality. But although ERPs are designed to carry out such tasks, they are not always designed to meet the more complex demands of the chemical industry
Leading ERP company SAP is currently working with several LIMS suppliers, to integrate LIMS into its R/3 software system. R/3 has a quality management module but, SAP points out, it hasn't been developed as a specific laboratory application, so it sometimes falls short of the desired performance.
For example, R/3 is designed to support quality control both across the supply chain and to supply data from simple measuring devices, like loadcells and multimeters, in plants and factories to management levels. But it isn't so good at coping with the specific demands of laboratories. When samples are sent to a laboratory, quality management involves tasks like controlling the lab's workflow; tracking of multiple samples through the lab, and integration of results from laboratory equipment such as mass, infra-red and ultra-violet spectrometers and gas chromatographs. All these instruments have to be calibrated by comparing their results against stored 'blanks' an ERP system couldn't keep track of the calibration of these instruments; moreover, it couldn't keep track of how often they are used, which is useful for calculating and predicting costs.
This is all within the job description of a LIMS, and SAP believes that the two systems can complement each other. By using both systems in concert, all information about a product, whether it was gathered by the QM system or during laboratory analysis, can be made available and used as part of the supply chain process, it explains.
