Confience’s TITAN® LIMS Allows a Leading Global Food Corporation to Meet Growing Demand for Food Safety Testing
Also plays a key role in achieving laboratory compliance and accreditation requirements.
A leading global food company based in the United States, whose products are sold in more than 40 countries to a wide variety of businesses, including supermarket and hotel chains, wholesale distributors, restaurants, and hospitals.
Their Challenge
The company’s corporate laboratory has been using the Confience TITAN LIMS system since 2013. Leveraging the inventory control function, instrument integration, and automatic reporting features of the LIMS application, the laboratory team has nearly tripled their weekly testing volume without adding personnel. This was possible by replacing a manual lab management process with a highly automated process, streamlining the testing, reporting, and auditing functions of the management system, while ensuring compliance with ISO 17025 guidelines.
After establishing positive results using TITAN, the laboratory began to take on additional challenges driven by the company’s growth into new markets and product categories. An increase in processing of packaged products at company facilities across the United States was causing a strain on the laboratory, since samples were being shipped from the plants to the lab for testing. Although using TITAN to manage the sample testing process was allowing the company to dramatically increase the weekly sample volume without increased staffing, space was a limiting factor. Additionally, the laboratory was being asked to conduct more research testing, adding more complex projects to an already busy routine sample workload.
D.E. | Senior Microbiologist & LIMS Administrator
Our Solution
The company has an existing network of satellite laboratories located at facilities around the country. They decided to turn these satellite labs into accredited branch labs under their ISO 17025 accreditation through the American Association of Laboratory Accreditation. Part of the process for accreditation was establishing the same LIMS system to manage their laboratory process. Working with the company’s information technology organization, a deployment plan was executed, leveraging their private cloud infrastructure, and Confience’s TITAN LIMS was rolled out to these branch laboratories.
In addition to implementing TITAN LIMS, the plan also includes interfacing scientific instruments to automate the transfer of testing results to the LIMS, thus saving time and eliminating possible data transcription errors. Using the same LIMS system to support multiple branch labs helps ensure that all labs are following the same testing process, properly documenting that process, and collaborating to balance workloads around the country. The LIMS configurability provides the company with the ability to fine-tune the LIMS as business requirements change. Its interface is user-friendly, easily adopted by laboratory staff. Confience’s training and support resources are being used to optimize the investment in the LIMS.
Currently TITAN is in the process of being deployed to the satellite laboratories and the company expects productivity gains and cost savings similar to those they have seen since it was initially deployed at the corporate laboratory. In addition, the company expects the LIMS to play a role in the following:
- Continued reduction of 15% on sample testing turnaround time.
- Proven traceability, which will be essential in achieving ISO 17025 accreditation at all laboratories.
- Confidence in an easy-to-display audit trail, leading to more efficient and effective audits.
- Compliance with USDA and FDA requirements via the sample testing process, and timely and accurate reports.
- Flexibility to route samples to other laboratories in the case of a weather emergency via the central TITAN database.
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