AssayNet LIMS Functionality

• AssayNet LIMS Functionality
• • Sample Logging
  • Sample Preparation
  • Tracking Tools
  • Worksheet Generation
  • Results Entry
  • Calculations
  • Programmable Display Formatting
  • Compliance and Verification
  • Remote Access

AssayNet is a client/server laboratory information management system (LIMS) built specifically for mining laboratories. Robust and highly scalable, the program was written to conform to the American Society for Testing Materials (ASTM) level II specification for LIMS. AssayNet contains all the features you would expect in an industrial-strength LIMS. From sample reception, logging, and preparation through analysis and reporting, the program has been designed to work the way you do. Its intuitive, menu-driven interface is easy to learn, yet feature-rich, providing access to a complete quality control (QC) program, quotations and invoicing, stock levels and inventories, sample storage, and more. Additionally, AssayNet enhances laboratory operations with functionalities like AssayLab Stats for real-time statistical analysis of assay results, enabling users to monitor trends and ensure precision. Users can view Determination Details, including analytical methods, detection limits, and calculated values, supported by a traceable audit trail. The system also provides insights into the Current Work in Progress (WIP) and tracks sample Turnaround Time (TAT), ensuring efficient workflow management and timely completion of analyses.

Built-in in the LIMS is a robust and flexible data analysis and charting tool, designed to give chemists immediate feedback about the validity of quality data from an analytical run. The program also allows managers and others responsible for quality to investigate longer-term trends, and assists in the provision and preparation of quality reports.

The program is multi-lingual in English, Spanish and French. The three languages can run in parallel, using the same data, in one location.

Sample Logging

From single samples to multi-thousand sample batches, logging that is both fast and efficient will save your staff time and save you money. A sample wizard allows you to rapidly enter series with repeating numeric sequences, while a co-ordinate entry system quickly builds up x-y-z co-ordinate labels. The system can import sample labels from other sources, such as text and spreadsheets, and it supports pre-defined sample lists and analytes, linked to an automatic scheduler for routine sample logging. Using the web interface, your customers can register samples remotely through a browser interface, and even print their own barcode labels, saving you labor and reducing the potential for sample labeling errors.

Sample Preparation

Virtually unique in minerals analysis is the attention that must be given to sample preparation protocols. Mine site and minerals lab managers understand well that they ignore sample prep at their peril. AssayNet allows managers and those responsible for quality to estimate the variance introduced at each stage of the analysis, including sample preparation. This lets them make informed decisions about preparation methodologies, including such things as optimal sample size, number of size reduction stages, and number and type of splitting stages. Information about preparation variance is normally gathered using split samples, taken at various stages along the preparation route. Many labs also introduce additional QC samples during preparation, as distinct from those introduced at the analysis stage. An example is the use of barren quartz washings to identify equipment contamination. AssayNet systems can track these independently, and they form part of the overall QC program. Finally, by analyzing sample products separately, AssayNet is able to perform intra-sample calculations such as for screen analysis with assay of fractions, metallics screen assays, and bullion analysis.

Tracking Tools

User-defined status codes allow the LIMS to track samples in the way you want, not the way a programmer decided you should. Find your work rapidly, or get instant feedback about work-in-progress with complex saved filters. Our revolutionary Job Book concept stores all analytical data in a readily-accessible and customizable register – so you can view everything in one place, anytime you want.

Worksheet Generation

Quality control integration and automatic worksheet generation are just some of the sophisticated tools that allow analysts to spend less time at the keyboard and more time on the bench. QC templates allow you to insert randomized and fixed-position QC samples according to pre-defined rules. Worksheet samples can come from different worklists and different clients, and can even have different sample types.

Results Entry

AssayNet accepts many different types of results entry, including numeric and textual values, as well as choosing from pre-defined lists, (for example, presence/absence tests). In addition, analysts can add comments to individual samples or results. These comments can be free-form or chosen from drop-down lists. They are indexed and can be configured to display on subsequent results screens as well as on customer reports.

Calculations

A using our intuitive, calculator-style equation editor, users can rapidly define complex, intra- and inter-test formulae, incorporating powerful, conditional logic rules. Examples range from simple analyte totals such as for PCBs, to complex ionic balance calculations across multiple instruments.

For raw data processing, AssayNet offers several correction options, all fully user-configurable, including position-based drift and blank correction, and matrix interference corrections for specific analytes.

Programmable Display Formatting

AssayNet takes the concept of results display and moves it forward a quantum leap. By linking display precision with analysis limits, the program can dynamically reduce display precision, (that is, the number of significant digits), at lower concentrations. It also adjusts display precision based on analysis inputs such as sample dilution.

Unit scaling allows the LIMS to automatically switch concentration units for high-grade samples. Because the program is fully unit-aware, users can mix units within the same test analyte, or change units quickly and easily at any time.

Finally, the program caters for separate instrumental units and reporting units, integrating unit conversion into the calculation engine. This allows you to create a single equation that works for any combination of instrument and reporting units.

Compliance and Verification

Adverse results can be flagged automatically, with custom alerts providing colored, on-screen and/or email warnings for out-of-compliance samples. Complex, cross-task verification rules promote peace of mind by checking results algorithmically before they are approved. Finally, results approval screens allow users unparalleled flexibility, giving multiple, user-customizable views of the same data, instant QC feedback and much more.

Remote Access

Your customers can log in and track their samples through the LIMS web interface, a secure, browser-based add-on for remote access. Clients can download reports in any one of several popular file formats, including Adobe PDF and Microsoft Excel.