Bioindustrial Services has a new laboratory information management system (LIMS).  LIMS was traditionally installed to improve the flow and tracking of samples in laboratories.  In recent years the focus has shifted as laboratories within large organisations that have evolved from cost centres to profit centres.  The added efficiency and business intelligence advantages that LIMS provide have become a competitive advantage.

Rajna Towers, MD of Bioindustrial Services, stated that: “We identified the need for LIMS software early in 2007 as we wanted to increase the capacity of our laboratory without increasing overhead costs.” She insisted on implementing a system that could be installed with the minimum disruption to current processes and would be flexible enough to deal with the challenges of Bioindustrial’s environment.  “We chose QBCon Lab-i because it was the only system that could be adapted to our working methods and did not require us to adapt to its methodology”.  Bioindustrial Services is a contract lab that performs a variety of tests, including chemical and microbiological tests for the pharmaceutical, veterinary, cosmetics, and food industries.

QBCon, the company that developed QBCon Lab-i, gained its experience in laboratory management systems when it developed such systems as part of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) business solution for the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) in the mid-1990’s.  Gustav Piater, marketing director for QBCon says: ”The development and customisation of our Lab-i product has seen it evolve to become a laboratory ERP system in its own right with the capability to do anything from invoicing to generating complex reports.” The change is an important one as regulatory pressure from accreditation bodies are increasingly pushing labs to produce more accurate accounts of their samples.

QBCon has identified LIMS as a growth opportunity in the South African market.  There are few local competitors and of those, many simply resell international systems.  These are sometimes not ideal for local laboratories or require expensive customisation.  The same holds true for web-based open source systems, as their maintenance and installation are often more expensive than buying the custom Lab-i system.  “For us the increase in productivity and resultant profit is proof that local is not only satisfactory, in this case it is better too,” says Piater.