Harnessing Data From Informatics Platforms To Boost Quality Management
Why food and beverage labs are leaning into enhanced LIMS platforms for quality and compliance
Original source, Lab Manager Magazine, October 2024 (Volume 19, Issue 8)
Quality management is essential for food and beverage labs to deliver high-quality results and comply with the latest regulatory standards. Food safety testing is crucial to safeguarding public health, minimizing economic losses, and ensuring a sustainable and safe food supply. Labs face evolving requirements from diverse stakeholders and need flexible, cost-effective solutions to support their role in ensuring the quality of all output from testing and analyzing food materials, identifying contaminants, ensuring ingredient stability, checking cross-contamination, and investigating package materials and production processes.
Lab digitalization creates a dynamic, connected lab environment enriched with advanced intelligence. Its goal—maximizing throughput and precision—allows food and beverage labs to enhance their processes for ensuring product safety and compliance and enabling innovation. By streamlining workflows and data management, lab staff can focus on solving complex challenges and driving innovation in the food and beverage industry.
Harnessing information from enhanced informatics systems like an advanced LIMS can strengthen quality management systems (QMS) and help labs maximize their return on investment. These tools and applications help drive efficiencies that address key industry challenges, enabling growth, streamlining operations, improving data integrity, centralizing recordkeeping, and supporting continuous improvement. Enhancing data integrity and reliability establishes the framework for implementing advanced predictive analytics, empowering labs with improved forecasting.
Challenge: Keeping Pace with Change
Labs must continuously adapt to health concerns, quality standards, and market demands in the regulated food and beverage industry. New test protocols are often required to respond to international and domestic regulatory changes, for example, decreasing maximum residue limits from the European Food Safety Authority, or new market trends like plant-based or CBD-infused products. Innovative food products can require extensive protocol development and validation to assess, for example, product stability. To
remain competitive and ensure a positive customer experience, labs also need to be able to quickly scale operations to meet demand fluctuations and adapt reporting format and accessibility according to changing expectations.
Testing labs need flexible software systems to accommodate growth and operational changes without service disruptions or added costs while ensuring their QMS remains effective.
Solution: Seizing control with modular systems
Enhanced LIMS with configurable workflows and modular design provide the flexibility to meet dynamic regulatory, client, and operational needs, allowing labs to respond quickly and efficiently to changes. Full control over digital workflows empowers labs to adapt processes or create new workflows as needed. Modular systems allow labs to expand into new service areas without changing platforms. Cloud-based software-as a-service (SaaS) deployment models offer maximum scalability, performance, and security, providing ongoing support for resilient, cost-effective solutions.
