Simplifying LIMS Test Maintenance Admin

Analytical testing plays a key role in ensuring the safety of consumer and other products and is therefore vital for both the manufacturers and users of those products. The need for testing is often mandated by governments or regulatory bodies, who may also define the standards that the products must meet. The testing involved may be complex with many different components or parts of the product requiring testing. However, the tests required may also be common across multiple products, for example flammability testing applied to furniture.

Organizations that undertake this type of testing, whether the testing be done in house or outsourced to contract testing laboratories, commonly rely on a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) to manage the required testing and subsequent results.

Grouping Tests to Reduce Complexity

One issue that testing organizations can face is in managing the sheer number and types of tests that have to be completed on products; a problem that is only exacerbated if specification limits need to be associated with the tests and applied to results.

To help manage this complexity many LIMS allow tests to be grouped and the group of tests to be assigned to the samples that are being tested. For example, a set of flammability tests may be grouped together to cover products made of polyurethane foam in slab form, for example ignitability using different sources including a match test, a smoldering cigarette test, and a flaming ignition source. A different set of tests may be set up for strength or durability of an item of furniture and a third set of tests for the durability of fabric used in a piece of furniture.  An item of furniture to be tested can then have the three sets of tests and their associated specifications assigned.

Linking Groups of Tests

In Autoscribe’s Xybion LIMS tests can be grouped together using the concept of a Substance (which can also be thought of as a product). A Substance may contain one or more tests, each test requiring one or more results. In many areas of analytical testing this simple construct works well. However, in situations where many different products may be subject to multiple different sets of tests and where some of these sets of tests may be common across different products it can be time consuming and complex to make changes to a group of tests. For example, if the requirements for flammability changed to include an additional test and the flammability tests were applicable to 50 different products, 50 different substances would need to be updated.

Grouping Substances

To overcome this Autoscribe’s Xybion LIMS supports the concept of Composite Substances. This allows testing required on a product to be defined based on any number of previously defined Substances (referred to as Primary Substances). Referring back to the possible testing required for a piece of furniture, a situation could be envisioned where a product range consists of three different products: a three-seater and a two-seater sofa together with a single chair. These different products may have different strengths tests required because they need to support different numbers of people, but because they use the same materials the flammability and fabric durability tests may be exactly the same. In this case a Substance would be created for each of the three products that would consist of the specific strength tests for each together with the common flammability tests defined as a Substance and the common durability tests defined as a Substance. If subsequently a change is required to, for example, the flammability testing, the change only needs to be made once to the flammability Substance definition and is applied to all three products at the same time.

Creating and managing common sets of tests in this way can be applied to any product or analytical testing that requires complex sets of tests to be carried out. Being able to manage the individual sets of tests cuts down the administrative burden and eases problems that can be caused by, for example, changing regulatory requirements. It also ensures that when a change is made it is applied to all the relevant items at the same time and none are missed out or forgotten.