Element LIMS improves efficiency at Babcock Laboratories.

Building on 100 Years of Quality Results.

In over 100 years of providing analytical services, Babcock Laboratories has earned a reputation of delivering the highest quality results. Located in the Inland Empire region in Riverside, California, Babcock Labs produces analysis of drinking water, wastewater, groundwater, storm water, soils, and hazardous materials. The lab serves a broad range of clients including large corporate accounts and individual property owners. Babcock Labs is an independent environmental testing facility that prides itself on using state-of-the-art equipment in their 21,000 square foot facility in order to stay current with technology and regulatory requirements.

According to former CEO Allison Mackenzie, Babcock Labs like many labs, faced the challenge of growing the business while maintaining a high level of quality control and facing an increasingly complex regulatory atmosphere. It became quickly apparent that the lab needed to upgrade their information management system and find ways to streamline laboratory operations.

Improving Access to Information.

Babcock Labs installed Element LIMS, which has become an integral part of their operation ever since. The transition itself did not take long, requiring about two days of onsite training from Promium staff members and around one month to transfer existing information and lab systems over to Element LIMS. This time frame is a shorter than most labs but shows what can be done when the staff is prepared and the implementation tasks are straight forward. Today, over 40 of Babcock Labs’ employees use the system—making up two thirds of the company’s staff.

Babcock Labs now has greater user-flexibility, including the ability to query data, manage statistics and perform QA operations with a single program. The lab has also benefited from the custom reporting capabilities within Element. With a large library of available formats, Element LIMS allows lab employees to tailor each report to meet specific customer needs. Information from Element LIMS is easily applied to other applications, to meet the needs of clients who are working with predetermined electronic data deliverables (EDDs). “There’s a flexibility for us to transfer the data out of Element LIMS and into formats designed for the client,” Mackenzie noted.

Babcock Labs clients have experienced benefits from Element LIMS as well. Because Project Managers have greater access to more current data, it can be made available to clients as it is produced, via the web access component of Element LIMS. This allows the lab’s clients to see reviewed data and view updates as they occur.

Increasing Efficiency Throughout the Lab

Using Element LIMS, the Babcock Labs sales team is able to quickly create bids that follow their unique pricing structure. The operations division is able to process and track samples more accurately and efficiently, improving accuracy and productivity.

Babcock Labs has also made significant improvements to QA procedures with Element LIMS. With internal control charts and the ability to create a fluid sequence of queries that capture the needed standards and information for each testing batch, Element LIMS has made it much easier to incorporate Babcock Labs’ QA processes and meet regulatory needs.

Babcock Labs has also found Element LIMS very useful from a project management standpoint. According to Mackenzie, the ability to look at historical data in Element LIMS, coupled with the custom operations and quality reporting, provides project managers with greater planning and oversight.

“Element LIMS is now key to the lab’s operation and has had a positive effect on almost every aspect of the company’s business,” says Mackenzie.