What is Laboratory Inventory Management Software?
Laboratory inventory management software is a digital tool specifically designed to efficiently track, monitor, and manage the laboratory’s assets and supplies. With the help of digitization and automation, routine tasks like reviewing expiration dates, ordering, and re-stocking are streamlined. The system is advantageous to healthcare facilities, pharmaceutical businesses, and testing laboratories in optimizing their resources, minimizing wastage, ensuring regulatory compliance, and ultimately enhancing the efficiency of their workflows.
Benefits
Before digital solutions, laboratories would make manual inventory logs of every piece of a test tube, a bottle of reagent, or a microscope, taking note of specific chemical names, quantities, expiration dates, last maintenance or calibration work, and so on. Aside from being time-consuming, the practice was also prone to human error. Laboratory inventory management software streamlines all these processes with the help of features like digital templates, barcode scanning, and GPS location tracking, detailing salient inventory information. Full visibility into the operations helps managers forecast demands, prevent excess and utilize resources better. Collaboration is also enhanced as notifications and alerts are sent to all relevant personnel when supply restocking or machine calibration is due.
There is no need to review paper trails when regulatory bodies request the submission of compliance documents. Thanks to automated reports generated from the digital inspection templates, technicians can efficiently accomplish the task and send complete reports with media attachments.
Best of all, laboratories can adhere to best practices like FIFO (First In, First Out) or JIT (Just-In-Time) inventory management systems, controlling costs and guaranteeing top-notch results every single time.
Key Features
There are digital solutions with laboratory-specific applications. There are also generic management platforms with functionalities that reinforce your current inventory methodology. Whichever you go for, make sure it has the essentials:
Checklists and templates for routine inventory
Real-time monitoring
Stock and usage tracking with barcode scans
Asset management
Usage tracking
Supplier management and automated reorder points
Collaborative tools
Reporting and analytics
Compliance assurance
Integration with third-party apps (LIMS laboratory information management systems)
Mobile Accessibility
Choosing the Right Laboratory Inventory Management Software
The digital solutions described above are all highly recommended, enabling your personnel to accomplish their supplies and equipment inventory tasks efficiently. Below is a table of all ten options for a quick review:
* billed annually