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[[File:|right|400px]] Title: How can a LIMS help a food and beverage laboratory better handle incident management and corrective action?

Author for citation: Shawn E. Douglas

License for content: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Publication date: February 2024

Introduction

Incident management and corrective action in general

Numerous regulations, standards, recommendations, and guidelines make clear that incident management and corrective action must be addressed by businesses in multiple industries, not only within their workflows and processes but also within the information systems they use to better manage those workflows and processes. Examples include:

An incident is typically represented as a deviation from a standard operating procedure or standardized method that leads to a product outcome that is less than ideal, such as a substandard or injurious product before or after distribution, a low-quality or poor-tasting product that causes customer or consumer dissatisfaction, a product demonstrating regulatory non-compliance, or a product with generally perceived food safety issues.[1]

As part of preventing incidents, the food and beverage manufacturer must not only ensure a well-designed and operational food safety system but also that it is able to monitor unsatisfactory or near-miss situations, analyze their trends and consequences, and investigate their root causes to better enable corrective and preventative action.[1]

The areas where the laboratory has the greatest impact in identifying potential and real incidents is through regular and/or randomized testing to ensure HACCP critical limits aren't violated, as well as other varieties of verification testing (e.g., raw material monitoring, environmental monitoring, end-product quality control testing, or even investigation of employee-reported issues) at various points along the manufacturing process. This is usually done in-house or with a contracted third-party laboratory, but in the case of incident management where testing doubts arise, some other independent accredited laboratory may be needed to perform testing.[1]

Increasingly common in modern laboratories, a laboratory information management system (LIMS) can prove useful in these matters. The next section explains how.

How can a LIMS help?

A modern LIMS for food and beverage laboratories is able to address a wide variety of needs for the lab, from sample reception, testing, tracking, and results management to quality, security, compliance, operations, and report management.[2] Some of that functionality is driven by regulations, standards, recommendations, and guidelines like those outlined in the previous section. In particular, some LIMS vendors have incorporated some basic form of non-conformance and incident management tools, but the robustness and extensibility of that functionality may vary from solution to solution.

Ideally, the LIMS would be able to, for example, send an SMS or email to the appropriate supplier in real-time when a pre-defined set of circumstances concerning that supplier's ingredients occur. Additionally, it ideally would also be able to re-prioritize or pause other related activities that are scheduled due to the identified non-conformance or incident.

These and other such LIMS functions should improve reaction time to non-conformances across the business.

Conclusion

References