Benefits of Barcoding in Food Testing Laboratories

Many food testing laboratories are under increased pressure to control costs while providing high quality data. Often this data is delivered electronically, and as quickly as possible, all the while ensuring that regulatory compliance goals are met. To survive in a competitive testing market, many laboratories turn to automation to provide them a competitive advantage. Automation tools include the implementation of a LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System), instrument integration and barcoding are just a few of the tools that laboratories deploy. Of these tools, one of the most affordable tools is the implementation of barcoding. A barcode is actually a font that is made up of various spaced parallel lines, and these lines of varying widths, can be read (interpreted by optical scanners called barcode readers) and often converted to a numerical value of the sample number. Some laboratories have more information that they would like to include on the label and this can be achieved with two dimensional barcodes, which appear as a geometric patterns and special two dimensional optical scanners are required to read them. The two dimensional barcodes contain additional information about the sample, the tests to be performed, the date, sample number and any other critical information. The LIMS can generate the barcoded
labels for all logged samples automatically. The main benefits of scanning barcodes include the time savings, over manually entering in a sample number or additional information in a two dimensional barcode, increased accuracy, elimination of transcription errors and increased productivity. 

For more information on barcodes in LIMS, please visit ATL’s web site at: www.atlab.com