These benefits are achieved in the areas of

• process automation

• instrument integration

• interfaces with enterprise, accounting and production systems

• barcoding and labelling

• reporting and data retrieval

Significant labour cost savings and cost avoidance can be achieved as LIMS improves the capacity and productivity of the laboratory, delaying staffing increases and associated recruitment costs. Increased sample loads are handled with the same staffing levels

Savings are made in eliminating most, if not all, of non-technical and repetitive activities, reducing the amount of clerical work done by highly trained professionals and allowing the scientists to do more science

Many technical tasks are automated and workflow alerts of pending tasks ensure no time lapses in meeting turn around times and leads to faster quality approval of raw materials and finished products

The manual process of labelling samples, creating analysis requests and worksheets, manually entering results and then having to review the entered data to reduce errors, is time consuming and costly. It slows down getting results to end users and there is still the risk of incorrect data slipping through

LIMS, and specifically instrument interfaces, reduce the number of times data is transcribed, increasing the integrity of the data. Automated features, e.g. exception handling, eliminate the need for human interaction for routine tasks. This significantly improves data accuracy

Outside the laboratory, LIMS streamlines the data flow and tangible savings should be sought through improvements in eliminating data transcriptions, simplifying access to lab data and the integration of LIMS with other business systems