Design and Testing of Laboratory Instruction Management System (LIMS)

Laboratory Integration Management Solution (LIMS) is a software/hardware system which is used in industrial laboratories for the integration of all laboratory software and instruments, training laboratory users, QA and QC. LIMS may also support data mining, data analysis, and decision making. In this project, we propose to introduce Laboratory Instruction Management System thus redefining the acronym LIMS. In chemistry educational laboratories, paper based laboratory notebooks and paper reports create an obvious bottleneck. They take hours of student’s time; they also overload the instructor with enormous amount of reading (40 - 60 pages of a notebook with multiple attachments plus over 100 pages of reports per student per semester). Paper notebooks and printing supplies dramatically increase the education costs. All these expenses, both time-related and financial, can be eliminated or at least reduced by implementation of LIMS. Students plan and document all aspects of an experiment from execution to results; laboratory instructions will be incorporated into a template and adjusted at time of preparation for a new lab experiment. Report preparation can be simplified by integrating with existing data acquisition system to reduce clerical errors and provide the ability to search on previous experimental results. A number of data acquisition software options were employed: NI Labview, Vernier LoggerPro, home-made macros for Excel, as well as proprietary programs from instrumentation manufacturer. The resulting report format was a file with appropriate link to data analysis files and raw data in electronic notebook.