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Lab efficiency you are looking forSIMATIC IT Unilab: LIMS and Integrated Quality for Breweries

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Leverage Lab ActivitiesSIMATIC IT Unilab & Brewing Library is the standard and most solid Qual-ity Management solution for brew-ers looking to optimize their quality and their laboratory efficiency at an affordable price.

To efficiently ensure quality and regula-tory compliance was always the very pur-pose of a lab in a nutshell, be it a QC lab, an R&D lab or a service lab. But the com-bination of strong market competition with an increasingly complex landscape of stringent regulatory requirements put an enormous pressure on manufacturers and production laboratories.

Their goal is not only to safeguard the brand name by ensuring overall product conformity and quality and meeting regu-latory demands. The product innovations that are so crucial to the company’s suc-cess also find their roots in the lab.

The increasing amount of lab work involved must be handled by a rather decreasing lab workforce, and at the low-est possible cost.

On top of optimizing its own efficiency, the lab is also expected to largely contrib-ute to business and production efficiency, helping improve processes and manufac-turing techniques and reduce scrap and rework. This requires an integrated qual-ity management system that can handle large quantities of quality data, covers all quality activities and supports the entire business process, improving not only lab efficiency but manufacturing efficiency as well.

Siemens understands these challenges and offers SIMATIC IT Unilab LIMS (Labo-ratory Information Management System), a solid and mature quality management system that can be implemented in smaller lab environments, or in multi-site and multilanguage environments.

Brewing Library

The SIMATIC IT Unilab Brewing Library is based on more than 15 years implemen-tation experience of SIMATIC IT Unilab in many breweries worldwide.

All best practices are clustered in the SIMATIC IT Brewing Library by the Compe-tence Center within the Siemens organi-zation for LIMS projects worldwide.

The library offers a preconfigured SIMATIC IT Unilab system that is adapted to a Quality Control environment and

contains Quality Control lab concepts dedicated to breweries.

A Quality Control lab of a brewery is pri-marily concerned with product quality and is therefore closely related with the brewing process in production. From the delivery of raw materials (e.g. malt) to shipping finished goods (e.g. a specific beer brand in kegs or bottles), product quality and variation must be monitored and effectively reported in order to deter-mine when process-corrective actions need to be taken and to verify that these actions were successful. This means that during the execution of a certain phase (fermentation, maturation), also the quality of the beer must be monitored to verify whether the production can move to the next phase.

While the costs for a LIMS implementa-tion are drastically reduced when install-ing the Brewing Library together with Unilab, the ROI is maximized. Moreover, the pre-configured workflows, test-plans, sample types, etc... which match a large portion of any brewery’s lab configura-tion requirements, enable appropriately authorized lab people to do the configu-ration themselves.

Managing all quality data

From quality checks of raw materials (e.g. malt) and finished products (e.g. bottled beer), over all sorts of analyses (environ-mental, competitor, ring, on-line, off-line, or R&D) to stability studies, SIMATIC IT Unilab manages all types of analyses within the brewery.

SIMATIC IT Unilab models and manages the complete workflow of all quality data in the lab and on the production line: samples, analyses, instruments, reports, and lab personnel, and offers a wide array of functionality and features to cover quality management:

• Time or event based sample Planning

• Worklists and worksheet management

• Verification and Validation

• Trending and SQC

• SOP support (Standard Operating Procedures)

Tracking & Tracing

Maintains the material operations history and allows the material genealogy navigation.

Qualification Management

Centralizes all information on per-sonnel to ensure appropriate certifi-cation and training.

Management by Exception and Alarm handling

Lab workflow configuration to sup-port automatic validation of in-spec analysis, leaving the lab supervisor the time to focus on off-spec samples.

Barcoding

SIMATIC IT Unilab can generate and define barcode labels for faster uploading and tracing of quality data.

Cost Calculation Module

Automates the invoicing process for commercial labs by calculating the costs of an analysis based on price catalogs and passing these to accounting.

Stability Module

Detects the effect on quality of envi-ronmental influences such as tem-perature, humidity, and light. This helps determine storage conditions, retest periods, and shelf lives when new products, ingredients or dosage forms are introduced.

Hand-held devices

SIMATIC IT Unilab supports the use of tablet or pocket pc’s by mobile lab or production personnel to save time and avoid duplication errors.

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• Instrument Connections (Uniconnect)

• Audit trail and electronic signatures

• Archive & Backup

• Unicode and Multilanguage support

• Advanced Web Functionality

• Multi-time Zone and Multi-site support

• Certified SAP Interface

Lab Efficiency

SIMATIC IT Unilab offers an intuitive LIMS environment with the GUI (Graphical User Interface) allowing the lab manager to manage LIMS workflows, work load, lab personnel and their qualifications.

SIMATIC IT Unilab provides time based or event based sample planning and auto-matically generates worklists per analyst. Significant time savings are the direct result of the instrument connections to the LIMS to speed up data entry and eliminate manual data entry errors, as well as the automatic reporting function-ality with pre-defined reports and auto-mated generation and distribution of approval reports and certificates of analysis.

Production Efficiency

SIMATIC IT Unilab follows the trend to shift from analysis of finished products towards quality analysis during the pro-cess, supporting quality checks during the process as defined in the SOPs, giving

immediate feedback to the plant on analysis results. From the reception of raw material, through the different pro-duction steps up to the shipment, the quality and variability of products and processes are monitored and reported.

This optimizes decision-making and sup-ports corrective action taking and drasti-cally reduces scrap and rework. Through-out the production, the quality control laboratory may also be involved in envi-ronmental testing. This secures produc-tion hygiene and helps control impact on the environment.

Regulatory Compliance

SIMATIC IT Unilab can help your labora-tory to comply with every major quality standard, such as GLP, GAMP, ISO 9001:2000, ISO 17025 and 21 CFR Part 11. SIMATIC IT Unilab manages and docu-ments the full lab workflow and access control, providing electronic signatures and an audit trail.

In addition, SIMATIC IT Unilab provides QA/QC specifications and manages and enforces methods and procedures cen-trally. The modules for equipment man-agement and qualification management guarantee that each analysis is per-formed by a qualified analyst on a cali-brated instrument. Direct connection of instruments to the LIMS guarantees that information required for regulatory com-pliance is all stored.

SIMATIC IT Unilab bridges the gap between the lab and the produc-tion, manages the workflow in labo-ratories, optimizing collection, analysis and reporting of quality data in the lab and on the produc-tion line.

Breweries bracing them-selves to efficiently handle a large variety of lab and quality data in ever increasing quantities will find themselves in a posi-tion to leverage this lab efficiency and use all avail-able quality data to improve overall product conformity as well as man-ufacturing and business efficiency.

Get more information:

marketing.simatic-it@siemens.com

www.siemens.com/simatic-it

Siemens AG

Industry Sector

Industry Automation

Subject to change without prior notice.

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