A lifeboat for a lab ‘drowning in data’

City of Tshwane’s Rietvlei Laboratory has been revolutionised by its new labmanagement system: saving time, enjoying better control and improving service.

Chemical TechnologyApril 2008

City of Tshwane’s Rietvlei Laboratory tests and monitors drinking water in the area, with the purification plant producing40 megalitres of potable water each day. Until recently, however, the little lab was “drowning in data”, says Lab ManagerLeanne Coetzee. “We were using Excel and capturing data by hand, growing overloaded and becoming concernedabout human error. So we decided to find a way to manage our data and gain control,” she explains.

But the Rietvlei Lab was apprehensive about cost, as research suggested systemsof R1 million or more. Leanne adds, “Other labs who’d bought big systems hadpaid a fortune, and told us afterwards that they didn’t use half of them: they werecomplicated and required a lot of ‘extras’. So when we shopped around, we knewwhat we didn’t want.”

The lab had three criteria: affordability, in light of its size and resources; the abilityto integrate its existing system into the new system; and access to above-averagebackup. It looked to the older, bigger Daspoort Laboratory – a wastewater lab –for guidance.

Daspoort was using a lab management system (LIMS) called LabInfo, created by Technology Systems Integration(TSI), and Leanne met with TSI. “Within a few days,” she says, “TSI understood what we do, what we need and howto customise its LabInfo system for us; for instance, so we could integrate our lab instruments with the system.”

LabInfo contains a highly modular instrument integration framework, making it easy to interface with any instrument.Bi-directional instrument integration lets the system generate task lists for lab instruments and then read the resultswhen they’re available. And system users can define allowed limits for their results or have LabInfo calculate thembased on historical data. This is exactly what the Rietvlei Lab required.

The lab is particularly excited about its new ability to look back in time to quickly find and input historical data – wherebefore, staff had to spend time hunting for it. “We have more control and can offer a more professional service now,”says Leanne, who was also impressed by LabInfo’s cost-effectiveness: “It is a fraction of the cost of other systems,because it is locally developed and uses free open-source components.”

In addition, Rietvlei wanted storage on a secure server, full-backup with no hitches and access to a real supportstructure: “We’d used a system without a backup facility before, and lost three months’ worth of data. So we neededto be sure that, if there were power cuts, electricity spikes, human errors or even complete system failures, we’d becovered.

“We’re lucky with LabInfo – backups are simpleand can be done securely over the Internet,the support turnaround time is excellent, there’sa solid fault reporting system, and we can evenattach the files we’re having problems with, forspeedy advice on fixing them.”

In the few months since its installation, LabInfohas revolutionised the way things happen atthe Rietvlei Lab. Leanne explains that, whileshe used to spend a day or two generatingreports, the same job takes only seconds now:“One click, and there’s my report – in aDepartment of Water Affairs format, acompliance format or a customer format. Andit’s user-friendly, because it’s structured exactlyas I wanted it to be.”

Aerial view of the Rietvlei area