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How LIMS Helps Laboratories Manage Equipment Efficiently
Discover how a LIMS can revolutionize equipment management in laboratories, streamlining scheduling, recordkeeping, and maintenance to ensure operational efficiency.
Equipment and instruments undoubtedly represent a laboratory’s largest capital investment, and careful management of that capital should be a top priority. However, keeping equipment under control can sometimes fall by the wayside amid the many other high-priority tasks in a lab’s day-to-day operations. It’s easy to overlook preventive maintenance, yet neglecting your equipment can lead to losses, costing your laboratory significant time and money.
A Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) offers an excellent way to manage your lab equipment, ensuring its continuous operation. With a LIMS in place, you can ensure equipment is always properly calibrated, receives adequate maintenance, and has its performance properly monitored over time. A modern LIMS also saves considerable time, freeing lab staff from most of the equipment oversight workload. The LIMS can handle everything automatically, requiring very little effort from laboratory staff.
In this article, we highlight five ways a LIMS helps manage all of a laboratory’s equipment and instruments:
Recording Equipment-Specific Information
Each piece of laboratory equipment holds crucial information that must be properly documented, usually found in the documentation provided with new equipment. With a LIMS, you can efficiently enter all the essential “demographic” data related to each instrument, such as manufacturer, serial number, model, installation date, and more.
You can also upload PDF manuals and manufacturer training documents. These files are often stored in seemingly random locations, making them hard for new team members to find. However, by centralizing all equipment information in a LIMS, anyone can easily access useful operating manuals and training presentations.
The system also lets you track changes to instrument data. This way, you can identify which team member updated an equipment record, when the change occurred, and what the old and new values were.
Scheduling Calendar and Availability Status
Nothing is more frustrating for a lab analyst than discovering that essential equipment or a reagent isn’t available when needed for a test or analysis. Unfortunately, amid busy work schedules and tests that span several days, it’s common to forget to check with colleagues about equipment availability in the coming days. While some laboratories try to keep whiteboards or spreadsheets to track availability, these methods can lead to errors and delays.
With a LIMS, you can easily manage equipment scheduling. Each piece of equipment can have a calendar that your lab quickly uses to schedule experiments. Only specifically authorized personnel can book equipment, with a booking calendar accessible from anywhere. Whether you’re in or out of the lab, it’s easy to check the equipment schedule.
The calendar can also indicate whether an instrument is out of service and requires maintenance or calibration before use.
Calibration, Maintenance, and Installation Records
A lab team using a wide range of equipment can struggle to track whether all of it has been recently calibrated or maintained. The countless records generated by staff for each instrument risk getting lost when stored in random drawers or folders forgotten on a computer.
Instead, it’s feasible to store all relevant equipment records in a LIMS, consolidating them in one easily accessible place. Within seconds, you can identify when a piece of equipment was last calibrated or maintained. The LIMS will also centralize all installation, calibration, and maintenance files in a single organized location.
Preventive Maintenance Scheduling and Reminders
Keeping track of all laboratory equipment—identifying what needs calibration or maintenance and when—can be an extremely challenging task. Some equipment requires monthly attention, while other units need servicing every three, six, or twelve months. Juggling these overlapping schedules can become a real source of concern. Without a proper method for monitoring and caring for each instrument, the potential result is laboratory equipment operating out of specification, jeopardizing the accuracy of the analyses performed.
The challenge of scheduling equipment maintenance and calibration can be fully overcome with an efficient LIMS, since you can assign each instrument its own specific maintenance/calibration requirements, establishing a unique schedule that you configure only once.
All the stress commonly associated with tracking your equipment is eliminated. To make things even more convenient, you can rely on the LIMS to send automatic email reminders when it’s time to calibrate or perform maintenance on a piece of equipment.
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Recording Deviations or Failure “Events”
Every piece of equipment occasionally “misbehaves,” experiences incidents, or simply breaks down. When that happens, it’s extremely important to log it in a deviation or “event” record. This helps you understand how your equipment is malfunctioning over time. Is the same error recurring, or is the equipment experiencing different errors? How often is the equipment malfunctioning?
If you don’t record these “event” details, you’re likely to overlook them. It’s unlikely that an individual user will remember the details later, or even know how to share the information with someone investigating the equipment’s malfunction over time.
An event log within a LIMS is the perfect place for any user to quickly record details when a piece of equipment malfunctions. By logging this information, you can quickly identify trends, helping prevent future malfunctions. If the equipment is defective, you’ll have solid data to provide the manufacturer. This limits the chances of the problem being attributed to “user error.”
In summary, adopting a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) offers an efficient approach to equipment management in laboratories. Through centralized information, streamlined scheduling, consolidated records, and automatic reminders, a LIMS delivers efficiency, accuracy, and proactive problem prevention. This solution saves time and prevents losses, ensuring the continuous operation of laboratory equipment.
