How Quick (or S-L-O-W) is Your Lab's Turn Around Time?

Do you complete samples within a day? A week?

How can you track this? Does your LIMS make this easy for you?

What about other software? Does your accounting software (Quickbooks / Peach Tree) tell you the average Turn Around Time that it takes for your invoices to be paid?

What about your inventory application? Does that track the turn around time between order placement and receipt of goods? How about between receipt and consumption?

Turn around time is everything, and you need a good dashboard tool that allows you to report on not only Turn Around Time at a high level, but also the ability to filter (or filter out) different types of data.

All of these questions are valid, and all for the same reason: Your testing lab may enjoy the most amazingly quick and prompt turn around times, which will no doubt boost sales and profits, however you are doomed if you cannot prove this electronically the one or two times that you are called on to do so.

The best LIMS for a lab is the one that allows you to quickly obtain the average turn around time, whether it be for all samples of a particular type (like compliance for environmental labs) for the friendly and uninvited inspector, as well as for a customer that calls you on the phone. Reporting and ad hoc querying is everything.

If you were accused, perhaps, of having less than exceptional turn around time, how would you be able to quickly and definitively dispute this accusation, assuming that it was false? The answer is to have an electronic dashboard, or dashboards, in place to allow the immediate quantification and display of this information.