TECHNOLOGY EVOLUTION AND ITS IMPACT ON LIMS FUNCTIONALITY, COST, AND RoI

For many organisations, their Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) is a mission-critical component of their overall corporate Information System (IS) -- whether the company is in a regulated industry such as pharmaceutical manufacturing or in a nonregulated industry such as petrochemicals. LIMS provide the integral connections to these companies? laboratory data, instruments, analysis and reports. Today, LIMS are in the fourth generation of evolution, and many organisations must upgrade or modify their LIMS to ensure optimum interoperability with the overall corporate IS infrastructure. Now, the proliferation of choices makes selecting the best LIMS architecture more critical than ever. The task of selecting the correct LIMS for an organization is complicated further because many of the terms used to describe different LIMS and system architectures are used interchangeably. This article will provide clarification of the terms as well as the capabilities of each type of solution.