For a long time Excel was a unanimous tool, helping companies become more efficient and making people more productive at work – and its importance throughout the business world is gigantic. But the situation has changed. In a world where data, information, and the needs for data security, integrity, and sharing change by the minute, Excel may not keep up with the speed at which it does.
And it is in this scenario that we will talk a little more today. You’ve already read here in Optimal’s blog about the importance and advantages of automating your laboratory and counting with the best that technology has to help in the day to day functions. Within this aspect of modernization we find a very common limitation that we explained above and it’s about it that we’ll explain in today’s article.
We are talking about the limitations that conventional spreadsheets have that hinder the storage and analysis of the various data collected daily within an environment such as a laboratory. Here are some reasons why your company should migrate to a LIMS for good.
What is a LIMS?
After all, what is a LIMS, right? It stands for Laboratory Information Management System. In a nutshell, it is software that will enable you and your company to manage all samples and the data associated with them effectively – from the registration of your laboratory environment, through end-to-end sample lifecycle management, to the issuance of analytical reports and results statistics.
A major goal of LIMS is to facilitate the automation of laboratory workflows by integrating the necessary instruments and equipment into analytical routines and analyst workflows. Cloud-based LIMS solutions such as Labinfy further enable you to have the highest standard of security to ensure integrity, governance, and faster access to laboratory data and information, resulting in more reliable results, standardized processes, replicable activities, and improved operational efficiency.
Although the main purpose of a LIMS is to track and manage samples, it can do much more, such as:
- Enable automated flows to reduce typing errors
- Centralize management and bring greater integrity to quality-related data
- Facilitate the visualization and comparison of results found with validation parameters
- Import results from equipment or other systems to improve laboratory efficiency
- Enabling areas of interest to access the tool to consume information and data related to each one of them
Integrated Data
The food and nutrition industry generates an unprecedented amount of data. Faced with increasing data volume and sample throughput, along with frequent changes in technology, laboratories must modernize their approach to managing, tracking, and centralizing laboratory data. And that’s one of the key advantages of adopting LIMS into your environment: the integration and easy management of data of different natures, whether from wet labs, aminogram platforms, or equipment such as NIR.
In practice, instead of opening spreadsheet by spreadsheet to find a piece of information, LIMS does the necessary search and delivers a combined analysis between what you are looking for and possible variations from other experiments. This kind of digital, easy-to-use data manipulation procedure makes the difference in the laboratory’s organization, both in terms of more assertive decision making and improved data security.
Better data visualization
Traditional spreadsheets tend to be visually unattractive, no matter how much time your team invests in creating fields in different colors, or separating each piece of information into a different type of sheet. This actually wastes your employees’ time and energy, which could be used for other more productive and strategic tasks.
In this case, LIMS presents the information you and your team need in an organized, easy-to-use, streamlined, and interactive way. This makes it more interesting to analyze and work with the data collected.
Data security and integrity
When we talk about adopting digital procedures within a company to improve the workflow, as well as the storage of information and compliance with demands, data security is often mentioned. Not for nothing, after all, there are many numbers, reports, and materials that are confidential or that support regulatory standards that companies need to meet.
What’s more, if your company data is changed or deleted – and you don’t know how, when, and who changed or deleted it – it can have a major impact on your operations. And digital tools are great allies in achieving the integrity that each and every company needs.
LIMS solutions can perform a validation of the data entered by the user, who even needs to be logged in and verified to ensure that entry is always done by known persons. This approach allows data to be secure and easily found, making it easier not only to organize but also to ensure less risk of lost and duplicated data.
It is also worth mentioning that solutions hosted in reliable clouds, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, and Google Cloud, can ensure higher data security by implementing a series of strategies: automated backups, continuous monitoring for threat detection, user permission management, access management, automated testing and security analysis, encrypted data, among many others that can decrease your business risks.
Ease of access and mobility
Another advantage of the LIMS system that is very interesting and that makes a total difference for your laboratory is the ease of access, since its information is stored in the cloud and can be viewed in different places, so it is not restricted to a single place. This versatility allows greater mobility and autonomy to your employees, since they can also be accessed outside the laboratory.
Automatic and constant updates
Now think of the time spent by each member of your team having to manually update traditional spreadsheets for each new piece of data found in a study, test, or solution. You could say that it is counterproductive to perform this task in a non-automated way. Unlike when the company has already migrated to the LIMS system, which has as one of its functions to automatically update the information that comes in. In this way, when your entire operating system is in this digitalized state, the new data will be added to the process that is due to it.
Therefore, it is advantageous for your company to count on this type of service, since your investment will be more assertive having a functionality like this.
Decreased document loss and errors
Besides the precious time lost when filling out spreadsheets manually, you also have to reckon with human error – after all, it can happen. But the consequences of a mistake, however small, can cause huge losses for the company.
In this same sense, unfortunately, it is not unusual to meet some company that has lost its documents because they are not in the cloud or stored in a system that is protected from third-party attacks and crashes.
Therefore, an automated system is ideal to prevent this type of occurrence, since everything is done in a digital and integrated way.
Conclusion
An Excel spreadsheet, for example, offers you many functions, but they are limited and not fully dynamic for day-to-day laboratory use. There are many possible risks that arise from the use of Excel spreadsheets. Be it double data entry, a waste of time that could be directed to focus on the company’s results and not on manual and operational activities, and security problems such as corrupted or tampered files that decrease the integrity of the data.
We know that Excel is a powerful tool and has many advantages. However, LIMS software, especially cloud-based ones that work to integrate information and offer it in an intuitive, powerful and practical way to employees, turns out to be a more interesting option to implement more modern, efficient, easily scalable and collaborative quality management policies among the company’s different stakeholders.
