Maintaining Laboratories

Overview

A laboratory is the entity at which production occurs, that is, it tests samples that are received from clients and provides certified reports of results back to the clients. A laboratory could represent a corporate site or an external site, and can be present in full in the LIMS, or as a stub used for subcontracting.

CCLAS 6 caters for two main types of laboratories: commercial laboratories and production control laboratories.

  • A commercial laboratory is a business that has at its core the provision of timely and accurate inspection and testing services for the purpose of maximising the profits for the shareholders. Commercial laboratories compete with other laboratories for the provision of these services, and the reduction of internal costs is always a challenge to the laboratory owners and managers.

  • A production control laboratory is usually an internal department of a mining or manufacturing company, and at its core is the provision of timely and accurate inspection and testing services for the purpose of minimising the costs for these services to the operation.

Sometimes a commercial laboratory operates within a production environment as a commercial venture, for example, a laboratory managed by a commercial operator on behalf of a mining operation.

Process

Laboratories are maintained using the CCLBRT—Laboratory application.

Maintain laboratories

Laboratories returned from a search can be exported to a report. Refer to Generating Grid Reports. Available report templates are defined in the SEARCH_REPORT_CCLBRT application preference.

When a laboratory is created, it is created with no accompanying entities, that is, no preferences, etc.

When a laboratory is created, it must link to an Organisation Code and have a Laboratory Code that is unique in the instance. Multiple laboratories can link to the one organisation.

A laboratory must have a Laboratory Type of:

  • External, or

  • Instance—When an instance type laboratory is created, the following entities are copied from the DEFAULT_LAB into the new laboratory:

A laboratory's Organisation Code, Laboratory Code and Laboratory Type cannot be updated.

A laboratory's Is Active flag, Time Zone, Precision Code, Auto Validate Product Specs and Is Available for Login have down-stream impact.

All properties on the Invoicing tab have down-stream impacts on raising invoices and job costs.

All properties can be used in reporting DSCs, templates and scripts. Refer to the CCLBRT—Laboratory Detail screen.

A laboratory can be saved as another laboratory in the same organisation. This effectively allows a laboratory to be used as a template to create subsequent new laboratories without manually entering all the configuration. The new laboratory is created with all the properties and custom attributes from the source laboratory, and in the same organisation as the source laboratory.

Laboratories can only be deleted where:

  • The laboratory has a Laboratory Type that is something other than Instance.

  • There are no job or sample records of any type (production, laboratory batch, internal, proposal, template, schedule, draft) linked to the laboratory.

    Note: To delete a job so that a laboratory can be deleted, all associated report requests and invoices must have already been deleted. Then, upon job deletion, all associated job audit records are deleted.

  • There are no configuration records linked to the laboratory.

    Sequence of Deleting Configuration Records to Allow Laboratory Deletion

Where a laboratory can be deleted, upon deletion, then the following entities are also deleted:

  • Addresses where CCADDRESS.OWNER_ID = CCLABORATORY.ID

  • Laboratory accreditation bodies where CCLABORATORYACCREDBODY.LABORATORY_ID = CCLABORATORY.ID

  • Laboratory lines of business where CCLABORATORYLOB = CCLABORATORY.ID

  • JI core entities in MSF020, MSF02A, MSF02B, MSF02C, MSF02D, MSF02E, MSFPRD, MSFPRF where DSTRCT_CODE = CCLABORATORY.CODE

JI-core Legacy

A laboratory is linked in a one-to-one relationship with a District. A District is a legacy entity that is used within the JI-core framework upon which the CCLAS application is built, to drive security and access permissions and system devices.

Lines of Business

Laboratories are linked to one or more lines of business on the Lines of Business tab, to denote the type of analytical testing offered by it. The association of a laboratory with a line of business limits the use of org-scope schemes, products, biofields and template jobs by a user logged into the laboratory. Refer to Maintaining Lines of Business for a Laboratory.

Laboratory Addresses

Addresses can be maintained for each laboratory.

Maintain Addresses for a Laboratory

Laboratory Contacts

Contacts can be maintained for each laboratory.

Maintain Contacts for a Laboratory

Using Laboratories

Logging into a Laboratory

A user's security profile is configured to give a user access to one or more laboratories, for a given role. A user may have one or more roles for a single laboratory.

To start a CCLAS session, a user logs into a laboratory. Restrictions:

  • The user must be flagged as active.

  • The laboratory must be flagged as available for user log in.

  • The user must have at least one active (not suspended) role associated with the laboratory.

For each role the user has defined for the laboratory, the system assigns the rights of the role to the user, in an additive-best-outcome manner.

Creating Entities for a Laboratory

Entities within the testing environment are created either with organisation scope for a given organisation, or with laboratory scope for the user's current logged in laboratory.

A user has access to entities within the testing environment where an entity either links to the organisation associated with the user's current logged in laboratory, or links to the user's current logged in laboratory.

Maintaining Laboratory Groups, and Subcontracting Analysis

A laboratory group is a collection of laboratories. Once a laboratory is created, it can be assigned to one or more laboratory groups, as required.

Apart from being used in reporting DSCs, templates and scripts, the main functional use of laboratory groups is to manage the list of laboratories that provide subcontracting services to analyse samples for schemes when the analysis cannot be done in-house. A sample scheme's Subcontract Laboratory Code defaults to the scheme version's Default Subcontract Lab Code, which is, in turn, is selected from the active laboratories contained within the laboratory group defined by the SUBCONTRACT_LABS application preference, excluding the current laboratory.