QLIMS for Cannabis Companies - Part 1 of 3: Cultivation

In the lead up to ACannabis and AMCC 2020 conferences in March we are releasing a series of blog posts on how your organisation can implement laboratory informatics that can streamline your quality assurance processes right from cultivation to testing and finally manufacturing the medicinal cannabis product.

The first part of this series will focus on how QLIMS, Laboratory Information Management System, can help manage your cultivation facility and processes, with a focus on data management, quality, inventory and training management.

QLIMS and Cultivation

This is especially relevant for groups who are in the process of setting up or have already completed the set up of their cultivation facilities and are looking to implement a system to manage their plant yields, harvests and record each stage of the cultivation process

How can QLIMS help you?

Managing plant material and stages of cultivation:

• Generate unique ID's for end-to-end trace ability of plant samples, batches and harvests

• Segregate the different stages of cultivation by allocating a sample type to the batches associated with each stage

• Split plant samples into clones with trace ability back to the mother plant

• Track storage and disposal of plant materials

• Record wet, dry, trim and cure yields for harvests

• Set up automated calculations (Eg: Calculating moisture loss)

Maintaining product quality and consistency:

• Ensure only trained staff are performing any methods/techniques

• Track equipment maintenance and efficiency

• Document SOP's to ensure staff follow repeatable processes

• Record all metadata (pH levels, temperature, humidity, water nutrients) at each stage of the process

• 21 CFR Part 11 compliance

• Manage stability studies

Managing cost and staying competitive in the market:

• Track the current quantity and cost of raw materials, reagents and consumables

• Use a Business Intelligence suite to track the cost of nutrients and materials used for growing plants

• Create interactive charts to track batch/plant/strain yields to determine which is the most profitable

• Track turnaround times by task or staff

These are just a few areas where a robust LIMS can improve your cultivation and business practices. By being modular, tracking the subsidiary and allowing for integration to any other systems involved in a medicinal cannabis facility, a professional LIMS such as QLIMS acts as an extension to your staff's scientific skills and forms a critical part of the supply chain.

Stay tuned for our next post in the series discussing how a LIMS assists with extraction and analytical testing!

Upcoming conferences to meet the OnQ Software team

Conference trail update for first half of 2020:

- ACannabis (Melbourne) - March 2nd to 4th - PharmOut Australian Medical Cannabis Conference (Melbourne) - March 23rd to 24th - Future Labs (Melbourne) - June 15th to 17th Please feel free to come and speak to us about QLIMS, Clarity LIMS, digital pathology and anything lab informatics. There will be some exciting overseas locations in the second half of the year to in conjunction with our distribution network. hashtag

What to look for when using a LIMS to help with ISO 17025 for starters

This blog will give you an introduction into the basics of ISO 17025 and just some of the requirements which LIMS can help with.

What is ISO 18025?

ISO 17025 is a laboratory accreditation standard that all testing and calibration laboratories vie to achieve to prove their technical competence in performing an array of testing, calibration and measurements for standard, non-standard and laboratory-developed methods.

As the accreditation is almost entirely lab-centric, it comes as a no-brainer that a Laboratory and Information Management System (LIMS) has an important role to play. The central idea of ISO 17025 is recording everything that happens in the lab in terms of technical quality; as such traditional record-keeping methods like Excel, Access DB and paper do not 'cut-it' anymore. While for a LIMS this is part of its basic core functionality. 

Why do you need accreditation in the first place?

To ensure quality of course! An ISO 17025 accreditation helps labs to improve their reputation among current and prospective clients, gain a competitive advantage, meet international compliance standards and ultimately reduce costs. With such an accreditation in place your lab is effectively providing prospective clients with the assurance that it is strongly committed to providing quality products.

What are some of these requirements?

How is a LIMS going to help you?

• End to end sample data tracking can be monitored via a comprehensive audit trail that records every single change made to a sample

• Keeps track of all staff training records and qualifications to ensure that staff are certified to conduct the testing

• Tracking the maintenance and calibration of instruments as well as notifying lab staff when they use an instrument that is out of calibration

• CFR 21Part 11 compliance provides that added level of quality to have an e-signature where validation of tests and test results are concerned

• An inventory management system for tracking all lab consumables, including quantities, expiry dates, supplier information and MSDS’s 

• Managing, maintaining and updating SOP’s

• Automatically generate CoA’s

• Tracking chain of custody by recording what testing the samples have been sent out for, where they have gone and when they are due back

• CAPA (complaints and preventative actions) functionality can assist users in recording any major incident at the lab as well as the corrective and preventative actions in place to resolve the incident

As the ISO standards and regulatory requirements for analytical labs are constantly evolving, there is a need to implement a quality management system that can keep up with these requirements. Especially with increasing sampling numbers Excel and paper-based methods are no longer able to meet the demanding requirements for an ISO 17025 certification. The best method to meet these challenges is turning to automated solutions, like LIMS, that eliminate mundane tasks that exploit valuable resources.