What is a LIMS (laboratory information management system)?

LIMS stands for laboratory information management system. An analytical lab accepts many samples every day, splits each one into several analyses, and has different people enter and approve the results. A LIMS keeps all of that in one record instead of paper forms and scattered spreadsheets.

Its main benefit is traceability. For every result on a report, you can trace back which sample it came from, which method and instrument produced it, who entered it, and who approved it.

What does a LIMS cover?

• Sample receipt: registering and labeling the sample, recording its condition on arrival, and deciding to accept or reject it.
• Analysis planning: choosing the methods and parameters for the sample and assigning the work to an analyst or a unit.
• Result entry: entering results by hand or importing them from a file the instrument produces, and calculating derived parameters with formulas.
• Evaluation: comparing each result with regulatory or customer limits and reaching a conformity verdict.
• Approval and reporting: approving results at one or more levels, printing the report, and revising it if needed.
• Supporting records: instrument calibration and maintenance, sample retention and disposal periods, and billing.

LIMS and accreditation

The general requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories are set out in ISO/IEC 17025, published in Turkey as TS EN ISO/IEC 17025.

In Turkey, the Food Control Laboratories Regulation (Gıda Kontrol Laboratuvarları Yönetmeliği) defines accreditation as assessing a laboratory against this standard and supporting technical criteria, confirming its competence, and auditing it at regular intervals. The assessment is done by the Turkish Accreditation Agency (TÜRKAK). Where TÜRKAK’s scope falls short, another national accreditation body that has signed a mutual recognition agreement with the European co-operation for Accreditation (EA) does it instead.

Under Article 5 of the regulation, as amended in 2024, a laboratory can’t issue an inspection and analysis report without performing the analysis. It must be accredited for the official control sample analyses that the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry designates, and it uses the recording systems the Ministry specifies.

Accreditation is the lab’s own process, and software alone doesn’t make a lab accredited or compliant. The role of a LIMS is to keep the records an auditor asks for organized and readable after the fact.

LIMS in IWB

In IWB, the LIMS is the Laboratory module, and it works with your quote, invoice, and inventory records. Once a quote is accepted, you preview its lab lines and open them as a sample intake with its samples and analyses. QR-coded labels are printed at the intake desk.

A sample with a broken seal or signs of tampering can’t go through normal acceptance: it’s either accepted with a deviation or rejected. The module comes with a library of 54 standard methods.

Your lab defines its own limits. Regulatory values don’t come with IWB; you enter limit tables with a version, an effective date, and an official reference. Each result is compared with these limits and gets one of four verdicts: Conforming, Nonconforming, No limit defined, or Inconclusive.

Results are entered by hand or read from a text or Excel file the instrument produces. IWB doesn’t connect to instruments live.

Approval has three levels: the analyst, the laboratory unit supervisor, and the laboratory manager. The person who entered a result can’t approve it at the second or third level.

Each approved report gets a verification code. Anyone who scans the QR code on the printed report sees details such as the report number, the lab, and the approval date, but not the result values.

TÜRKAK and ministry certificates are kept with their validity and suspension dates, and IWB blocks parameters outside the accreditation scope on an official report.

Each analysis’s billable item is added to the billable analyses list at the point your lab chooses, for example at acceptance or at report approval. From that list, you prepare the draft invoice in Sales.