NTT DATA Business Solutions

NTT DATA Business Solutions | February 26, 2025 | 6 min.

3 Ways to improve your lab management and accelerate quality control

Christiaan Boon

For any manufacturer – or any company – saving time and costs to increase efficiency, and simultaneously keeping quality high, is vital. However, for manufacturers in life sciences, who need to ensure patient safety, it’s even more important. Stringent regulatory standards set by agencies such as the FDA and EMA to produce patient-safe products, require investment in thorough testing, quality management, and documentation. Processes that – as we all know – can be time-consuming and costly, creating potential bottlenecks in the supply chain.

For production companies in the life sciences industry, efficient lab management is essential for saving time, increasing efficiency, and ensuring quality. One of the most impactful ways to achieve this balance is by optimizing quality control in batch releases for raw materials, intermediates, and finished products.

The ultimate goal? Automating quality control while integrating systems for lab management with systems for production and supply chain planning. It speeds up batch releases, reducing lead times for processing of raw materials and final products. In the long run, this also translates into cost savings. Lining up lab management with your supply chain ensures that your lab performs analyses in alignment with production planning priorities, helping lab technicians focus on the most urgent batches first. This is beneficial not only for improving throughput but also for increasing profitability. Further down the line, it also helps ensure that products are shipped to the right customer at the right moment.

I can hear you thinking… ‘This sounds promising, but how can we achieve this?’. Well, if you have the ambition to increase efficiency in your lab management procedures, keep on reading!

The importance of the role of lab management and quality management in life sciences cannot be overstated. It’s the backbone of ensuring medicines are produced safely and effectively, directly impacting patient safety. It’s the very core of GMP. However, it’s not without its challenges. The necessary quality control processes involved, can cause unavoidable delays that can ripple through the supply chain.

Before raw materials can be used in production, they must be tested and approved. Finished products also need rigorous testing before they can reach patients. In fact, testing also includes sampling of water and the analysis of bacterial cultures in cleanrooms. It is not solely about the material flow itself but also about the facilities, utilities, and equipment utilized in the process.

While this testing throughput time is usually accounted for in the production planning, unforeseen delays in quality control often affect the production chain. And… the longer the quality control process, the longer it takes to sell the product to customers, resulting in delays across multiple departments – from sales to logistics.

3 bottlenecks in batch release

1.Prioritizing

One of the major bottlenecks in lab management is the complexity and time required for batch releases. Not every batch holds the same priority. A batch with sufficient stock has less urgency compared to a critical product that needs to be delivered to a customer. However, labs do not always have clear insight into these priorities.

2.Pooling of tests

Another challenge is the pooling of tests, where the lab waits to process multiple batches at once to maximize efficiency. This can be beneficial in some cases, but it is always a balancing act. This is especially true when it concerns samples that need to be processed with urgency but are forced to wait due to this practice.

3.Manual lab work

Additionally, the reliance on manual processes and paper-based documentation in many labs slows the entire operations down. Analysis results are often recorded on paper, manually entered into systems, and subsequently reviewed. This not only consumes a lot of time but also increases the risk of human error.

The impact of these inefficiencies on the supply chain is significant. Extended release times create delays in the overall supply chain, leading to higher inventory levels, higher costs, and, in extreme cases, risks associated with product expiration dates. In worst-case scenarios, products are released, only to reach a warehouse with limited remaining shelf life or even nearing their expiration date, creating risks for waste and financial losses, further complication distribution.

There are many challenges regarding the interdependence of your supply chain and your lab management processes, but luckily, there are also a lot of solutions. If – as a manufacturer in Life Sciences – your main objective is to ensure a high product quality, improve patient safety, and do this as efficient as possible by optimizing your lab processes – you have come to the right blog. Here’s how you can achieve this:

A simpler, more integrated system landscape reduces the need for multiple interfaces, lowering the complexity (and costs) of managing different systems. By consolidating multiple solutions for lab management into a single application – preferably one integrated with your ERP (like SAP) – you minimize both initial implementation costs and ongoing system maintenance.

This integration with ERP offers an additional advantage: it allows for better coordination between lab management, production planning and other departments using that application. For example, planning priorities, stock levels, and production demands can all be factored into lab workflows, ensuring that testing and batch releases align with the needs of production, sales, and logistics.

The more integrated your systems are, the better your end-to-end traceability becomes. When lab and ERP data such as material batches, production data, maintenance data (and more) are all housed in one system, you gain visibility of the entire production process. From raw materials to the finished product. This leads to faster, more informed decision-making and more efficient overall operations.

Automating key steps of the batch release process can dramatically improve both speed and accuracy. By moving away from manual entries and paper documentation, labs can save significant time while reducing human error. Direct integration with testing instruments allows results to be instantly recorded and validated without the need for multiple manual touchpoints.

Automation also enables labs to work faster and paperless. When data from various tests is automatically consolidated into a single system, lab personnel can focus on their core responsibilities instead of tedious administrative tasks such as the four-eye principle.

To sum it up: companies that embrace automation and system integration experience faster batch releases, lower operational costs, and reduced errors in quality control processes. For example, businesses using embedded SAP solutions achieve savings not only in labor but also by eliminating implementation costs, and licensing and support fees for standalone LIMS. For lab technicians, digitalization also means being freed from tedious administrative tasks.

Moreover, these integrated systems provide immediate access to critical analyses results. For example, data regarding the concentration of a particular substance in a batch can be instantly shared with production, ensuring that no time is lost between the testing and the next step in the production process. In short: releasing the right batch at the right time allows optimal production planning without standstill.

Steppingstone for fully digitalized labs

Beyond the obvious time- and cost-savings, automating and integrating lab management with production also paves the way for future optimizations. With a unified system, companies can explore other opportunities like digital batch documentation, automated review processes, and more advanced analytics. You can even take that first step to a fully digitalized – and paperless – lab.

Safe, high-quality pharmaceutical that are produced efficient, compliant, and cost-effective. That’s the daily goal for Life Sciences manufacturers, with quality departments at the helm. But the real gatekeepers of consistency and safety? The quality control labs. In this blog, Danny Groothuis explores the five stages of QC lab maturity, helping you go from outdated to outstanding.

Ready to future-proof your lab and eliminate inefficiency? Start by reading this blog!

The future of lab management is integrated

If you want to accelerate your batch releases and improve the efficiency of your quality management processes, digitalization and system integration are critical. A unified system not only simplifies operations but also ensures that labs can respond swiftly to the dynamic needs of production – and of course: customers themselves – while staying compliant with industry regulations.

Are you ready to accelerate your lab management?

Of course, I wouldn’t have been writing this blog, if our experts hadn’t effectively bridged the gap between standard SAP Quality Management and specialized, stand-alone LIMS systems. Good news – they did. Leveraging their extensive hands-on experience with daily operations in companies like yours, they have developed the exact functionality required to streamline and enhance your quality control processes, but then: integrated in SAP ERP.

Automated, integrated, advanced: Discover Lab Management Accelerated

You can now produce high-quality products with greater efficiency through our streamlined, simplified approach to quality control. Our Lab Management Accelerated solution for Life Sciences manufacturers seamlessly integrates within SAP S/4HANA, reducing complexity and driving operational excellence in laboratory processes.

Integrated, efficient, and future-ready: redefine your lab operations and take the lead in innovation and quality assurance.

Take a look at our Lab Management Accelerated solution.

3 Ways to improve your lab management and accelerate quality control